Swedish university students are to begin using a near field communication payments system (NFC) developed by payments processor Payex and secure mobile solutions specialist Accumulate.
For this, PayEx along with existing investors have invested US$2m of venture capital in Accumulate. The money will be used to further develop Accumulate’s mobile payments and mobile security business.
20,000 students are expected to be enrolled on the system by the end of this year, with a total of 100,000 students at a number of universities going live over the next six months, beginning with Uppsala University and Linköping University.
The CEO of Accumulate tells that even thought the solutions works great, it will take four to seven years until there is a critical mass of NFC enabled mobiles and NFC enabled merchants. Further, he believes their current solution is a bridging solution that works now and can bridge to the ultimate solution.
Accumulate’s Mobile Everywhere solution is based on patented One-Time-Ticket (OTT) technology used to generate one time transaction codes. With OTT no user information like user ID and password is transported or saved over the Internet, and the cost of SMS text messaging and/or separate security devices is saved. It is argued that this makes the solution superior to OTP (one-time password) and other solutions on the market.
