A Standards Body’s New Wearables Device Class Could Expand Contactless Payments

The NFC Forum, a standards body for companies developing and using near-field communication contactless technology, on Thursday announced a so-called “device class” for wearable devices aimed at increasing the use of such technology.

The new Card Emulation Device Class is the first of its kind, the Wakefield, Mass.-based organization said. Although an estimated 400 million people already use NFC-enabled watches, fitness bands, and wearable devices embedded into clothing, many of them enabled for contactless payments, the NFC Forum said in a news release that it is “answering an industry need for wearable devices that provide basic functionality and longer battery life in a tiny footprint while maintaining interoperability with the NFC ecosystem.”

The NFC Forum has now promulgated seven device classes that cover a wide range of mobile devices, chargers, and tags, each designed for different use cases and supporting specific sets of features. The CE Device Class in particular emulates a contactless card and provides connectivity to an existing framework such as a payment or access application. The class supports smart phones and wearables with miniature housings and extended battery life, among other features.

“OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) will benefit from this device class because the design of the CE Device strips out unnecessary features and functionality to focus solely on what a wearable NFC item needs,” an NFC Forum spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News by e-mail. One of those features is the so-called NFC Reader/Writer mode, which is not used in most wearables.

“It’s an ideal solution for OEMs seeking to reduce cost and extend battery life in their product line,” the spokesperson says of the new class. “As they say, ‘less is more.’”

Initial applications of the CE Device class are likely to involve payments, device personalization, and connection handovers, according to the spokesperson. “Longer term, the CE Device class will move beyond payments to IoT (Internet of Things), mobility as a service, and automotive NFC applications beyond access,” she says.

E-commerce and payments analyst Thad Peterson says the CE Device class “dramatically broadens the potential reach of NFC and opens the technology to new, yet to be envisioned, use cases.”

Peterson, strategic advisor at Boston-based Aite-Novarica, says in e-mail comments to Digital Transactions News that the technology “can be implemented in lower-cost phones, increasing the reach of contactless payments to millions of people who might not be able to afford a full-feature smart phone.” But he also notes the class “expands the opportunity for NFC transactions by providing a low-energy card emulation function for devices beyond smart phones.”

The NFC Forum, whose members include Apple, Google, Mastercard, and Visa, aims to promote near-field communication at a time when other technologies such as QR codes are making gains in payments. In July the group released results of a nine-nation survey it sponsored that found 85% of consumer respondents had used an NFC contactless card or mobile-payment wallet.