G&D and NXP Sign MIFARE Licensing Agreement

The market adoption of NFC, a technology co-invented by NXP, is accelerating. More than 50 NFC enabled handsets are already available. In addition, mobile network operators around the world are preparing NFC rollouts and are eagerly looking for new exciting applications for their end customers. Confirmed by a Juniper Research report from January 2012, mobile ticketing is one of the NFC applications most appreciated by end users looking for convenient devices and a new travel experience in public transport.

With MIFARE enabled secure SIM products, G&D is able to provide mobile network operators with solutions that perfectly fit the requirements and expectations of mobile ticketing. MIFARE is the most widely used technology platform for contactless applications on the market today, accessible through more than 50 million contactless readers and terminals across the globe. Public transport operators of more than 650 cities worldwide have selected MIFARE’s open architecture platform, reaching 1.2 billion people that experience the convenience of MIFARE every day. This existing infrastructure ensures best interoperability with these new MIFARE enabled SIM cards from G&D. It allows mobile network operators to make full use of such solutions and to develop an unprecedented interactive consumer experience for public transit, event ticketing, customer loyalty, and access control, thus generating new opportunities for additional revenue streams for their businesses.

“The strong presence of MIFARE in public transit and other key applications mandates that G&D enhances its SIM offering with highly demanded functionality,” said Axel Deininger, Group Senior Vice President and Head of G&D's Secure Devices division. “With the MIFARE functionality, we can provide a broad variety of instantly deployable use cases for our MNO customers.”

“MIFARE provides a fast track for mobile network operators to launch new NFC based products and services, and G&D will play a key role in achieving this. The NXP license comes with the inherent ability to perform over-the-air activation of the MIFARE functionality on G&D’s secure SIM cards. This helps mobile network operators to offer MIFARE as a default feature and thereby enlarge the overall market opportunity for mobile transaction services based upon the key technologies that G&D supplies,” said Henri Ardevol, vice president and general manager, secure transactions, NXP Semiconductors. “Adding such a strong SIM player as G&D to our MIFARE licensing program is also a landmark for the further development of MIFARE and NFC, with respect to the convergence of mobile ticketing to smart phones. It is a milestone in implementing our vision of making MIFARE available on all types of cards and devices.”

This agreement on the mobile market is another element of the long-lasting cooperation between two companies that encompass banking, personal identification and transit applications. NXP and G&D are both members of the MIFARE4Mobile Industry Group and actively contribute to the development of a uniform concept of managing MIFARE based contactless applications on NFC enabled secure elements, such as SIM cards. In addition to this latest license agreement regarding SIM cards, NXP licenses MIFARE to various leading chip manufacturers that supply MIFARE based reader terminals and smart cards. Over 1,000 business partners are already part of the open MIFARE community and ecosystem.