Pay-Buy-Mobile – put’s a credit card in your mobile

The GSMA’s ‘Pay-Buy-Mobile’ (PBM) initiative is at the heart of new services being rolled-out by the world’s mobile network operators that will enable you to pass a phone close to a point-of-sale ‘reader’ when you are buying goods or services. With PBM, it’s just like having your credit or debit card in your mobile phone. So, instead of handing over a physical card, you will simply use your mobile phone to pay for the goods and services that you have bought.

The service will typically be available in hundreds of shops, supermarkets, restaurants or railway stations – all around the world. When you’ve paid, the transaction will appear on your next credit or debit card statement. It’s as simple as that.

How Pay-Buy-Mobile works

Near Field Technology (NFC) is at the heart of the Pay-Buy-Mobile technology. Handsets equipped with an NFC chip can communicate with existing contactless payment systems. When passed closed to the reader, data can be exchanged between the handset and the point of sale device. This facility can be used to deliver a wide range of secure, interoperable and transparent services, such as credit and debit payments.

Specialised handsets offered by operators have their Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC), often known as the SIM card, linked to the phone’s Near Field Communications (NFC) chip. The 35 mobile network operators involved in the PBM initiative, which together have 1.4 billion customers, all support the use of the Single Wire Protocol as a standard to link the UICC with the phone’s NFC chip. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) adopted this standard in October 2007.

To enable the service, the credit card application is downloaded into the secure environment of the UICC that is embedded in the phone. More than one credit or debit card can be stored in the same UICC, thus increasing the convenience of PBM to the consumer. In use, data transferred by NFC from the handset to the reader is communicated to financial organisations using the same secure process as used for conventional credit or debit cards transactions.