Compliance: Partnership between EMVCo and the NFC Forum

• EMVCo partners with the NFC Forum (association working on contactless adoption). Together they should improve testing procedures applied to NFC compatible devices: align their specifications and enable mutual acknowledgement of their respective tests.

• if the two bodies were to manage synchronisation of their specifications, tests, accreditations, as well as the management of their overall certification processes, industry players could save time and money.

Source: Press release

• EMVCo, owned by American Express, JCB, MasterCard and Visa, was founded in the beginning of 1999 by Europay, MasterCard and Visa to favour the development of EMV. JCB joined them in 2004 followed by American Express in 2009.

• The NFC Forum (http://www.nfc-forum.org), founded in 2004 by several players in the mobile industry, aims at improving contactless adoption: education of involved players, dedicated standards to ensure media and services interoperability, etc. It now counts more than 170 members and is sponsored by Barclaycard, INSIDE Secure, Intel, MasterCard, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, NXP, Samsung, Sony, and Visa, among others.

• For the payments industry, this alliance could ease and streamline compliance procedures and allow for substantial cost saving.