In 2024, NFC seems to be "OK" again.
The first is the continuous promotion of Alipay's "touch".
In July this year, Alipay officially launched "Touch". Subsequently, Alipay's "touch" began to promote and layout, and in the supermarkets, retail, restaurants and other scenes in major cities, "touch" devices became more and more numerous.
As a short-range wireless communication technology, NFC has three major operating modes, namely card reader, peer-to-peer communication, and card emulation. Alipay's "Touch" uses the NFC "card reader" working mode, and users can complete the interaction after "touching" the merchant's device. Compared with barcode payment, "Touch" allows users to complete the payment in one step without showing the payment code or turning on the camera, and only need to touch the merchant's collection device with an NFC mobile phone, providing users with a more extreme operation experience.
On the other hand, Alipay's overall operation strategy makes "touching" not only limited to payment. With the expansion of coverage and business scenarios, the value of "touching" digital operation is gradually emerging. For example, the "Touch +X" industry solution supports services such as food ordering, opening smart cabinets, borrowing and returning power banks, and IP marketing interaction, adapting to diversified business scenarios. In terms of business support, Alipay has launched activities such as payment discounts, free orders, and gift collection cards by uniting local governments and merchants to carry out the "Touch" consumption festival.
As an influential mobile payment comprehensive service giant, the launch of Alipay's "Touch" has stirred up the waves in the application field of NFC technology in China to a certain extent. Not long ago, on November 7, Alipay and Huawei announced that they had reached a strategic cooperation, and the two sides will continue to cooperate in depth around the HarmonyOS ecosystem and the "Touch" ecosystem.
The second is Apple's open NFC.
In August this year, Apple announced that starting from the new version of the operating system iOS 18.1, developers will be able to use the Secure Element (SE) in the iPhone, not through Apple's Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, in the iPhone app developed by the developer, through the new NFC and SE API, developers will be able to provide contactless data exchange within the app, which can be used for closed-loop buses, corporate badges, student IDs, keys, merchant points and membership cards, Event tickets, etc., and may even support electronic IDs in the future. These APIs will first be available to developers in some countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States through the upcoming iOS 18.1 developer resources, with the opportunity to land in more regions in the future.
Apple's opening of NFC undoubtedly provides more options for developers in the market to expand the NFC application ecosystem. Recently, Vipps MobilePay Europe has become the first company in the world to launch a contactless payment solution similar to Apple Pay on the iPhone.
The mobile payment network believes that whether it is Alipay's new products or Apple's new developer policies, they have a positive effect on the entire NFC technology application ecology. For industry stakeholders, the pace and pace of application promotion should be accelerated at this time. However, over the years, NFC technology has demonstrated excellent experience in many fields such as mobile payment, access control, and tag reading, but it has never been as fast and efficient as expected. Perhaps this is not unrelated to the many roles in the NFC industry chain, such as equipment manufacturers, communication service providers, financial institutions, developers, merchants, etc., which may involve equipment manufacturers, communication service providers, financial institutions, developers, merchants, etc.
Therefore, it is very important to unite the role of the industrial chain and unify the standards for the application and promotion of NFC technology.
It is understood that the underlying technical standard of NFC originated from the ISO/IEC 14443 standard formulated by ISO/IEC JTC1 in 2001, which laid the basic specifications for NFC tags and devices in read-write mode and card simulation mode in terms of physical characteristics, RF simulation, initialization, anti-collision and transmission protocol. Founded in 2004, the NFC Forum focuses on the development and promotion of NFC-related standards and protocol specifications.
However, standards also need to evolve with the times. Due to historical limitations, the evolution of existing standards and norms has actually lagged behind the actual needs.
For example, at the beginning of the formulation of existing NFC standards and technical specifications, NFC applications on the market were still dominated by physical cards, and the relevant standards only defined how NFC tag devices such as bank cards could transmit information to NFC reading devices in one direction, without considering that mobile phone terminals can simulate multiple cards at the same time, which directly led to the inability of mobile phone terminal products to achieve accurate smart card selection. I believe that users who have used NFC analog card applications have similar feelings, and many times they need to set the default card in advance, otherwise it may lead to a bad experience such as card failure and wrong card swiping.
On December 17, ITMA (Smart Terminal Microelectronics Association), together with China Electronics Standardization Institute, National Radio Monitoring Center, ECMA Association, University of Hong Kong, Huawei, Alipay, Dinik, Shenzhen Intelligence, Ziguang Qingteng, Fudan Microelectronics and other near-field interaction industry chain enterprises, held the "One Touch Interaction, Touch the Future ITMA SUMMIT 2024 Conference" in Shenzhen. The vision of ITMA is to promote the development of terminal products in the direction of ultra-miniaturization, high integration, functional diversification and artificial intelligence through the development model of standardization and supporting industrialization services.
In conjunction with all parties in the industry, this conference mainly focused on the research of new near-field interaction technologies and standards (iTAP), and released the "iTAP White Paper on Intelligent Sensorless Proximity Protocol". Zhou Shengming, chairman of ITMA, said that in the face of new scenarios and new needs, a number of ITMA member units have jointly promoted the iTAP standardization project, and it is expected to release the 1.0 standard in the first half of 2025 to ensure the industrial application of new technologies through functional testing and compatibility testing.
As an innovative NFC technology standard, iTAP aims to bring a better intelligent interactive experience through technological innovation. For example, iTAP solves the technical problems of intelligent card recognition and activation, and realizes multi-scene switching to swipe through the gate or open the door in seconds. In order to achieve this goal, iTAP's intelligent card selection solves the card recognition problem by adding a card reader judgment module and opening up a card reading information reporting channel. In the payment application, iTAP can also choose the most suitable method for the user based on the user's payment habits, account balance, promotions and other factors.
In addition to the user experience of smart card selection, iTAP has improved the transmission rate, compatibility, security and other aspects by redefining the specifications of the physical layer, access layer, transmission layer and application layer, and the interactive process has realized efficient communication and data interaction between users and devices, which has made specific NFC applications such as car keys, high-density access control cards, transportation cards, and electronic ticketing have been greatly improved.
What's more, the iTAP protocol is also highly scalable. As technology evolves and application needs change, iTAP is able to meet new application needs through simple upgrades and expansions. This high flexibility and scalability also makes the iTAP protocol have great potential and value in future applications. In this way, the iTAP standard will derive more new scenarios in the future, such as fast connection and pairing between devices, data transmission between different devices, etc.
In general, the interactive process of iTAP technology combines the advantages of non-inductive proximity under smart card selection, high security under high-strength commercial cryptography algorithm, fast response efficiency under massive applications, and compatibility with existing NFC technology. This design not only simplifies user operation and provides an intuitive and natural interaction experience, but also sets a new benchmark for communication between smart devices by enhancing data security and improving operational efficiency. With the continuous evolution of technology, iTAP is expected to become one of the mainstream technologies for smart device communication in the future, helping the new development of near-field communication applications, including consumer payment.