PayPal NFC mobile wallet shaping up in Sweden with Accumulate

PayPal gearing up for NFC mobile wallet, Accumulate wants run the security detail

If you want a clue about what PayPal is up to in regards to NFC, you need look no further than its new partnership with Swedish firm Accumulate. PayPal is working with Accumulate to add the firm’s security platform, “Mobile Everywhere”, for what Accumulate calls “coming mobile services.” The agreement in place between the two companies is at this time a Swedish-only affair and for Swedish consumers. In viewing what PayPal is planning for Sweden, we can ascertain what the company might have in mind for the rest of the globe when it comes to NFC payments and its NFC mobile wallet.

”The agreement is great news and we look forward to partnering with PayPal and to support the innovative mobile services based on our technology,” says Stefan Hultberg, CEO of Accumulate.

PayPal and Accumulate ME platform NFC payments aspirations for mobile payments

PayPal hasn’t decided to sign an agreement with Accumulate for no reason. The company has a robust system that will give PayPal users a lot of tools. When you think of Accumulate services, think of organizations like Margento or C-Sam, where a broad amount of services surrounding NFC payments and consumer engagement has been brought into one set of services that can be built into a separate application for use on an NFC smartphone. For an NFC mobile wallet to be robust and capitalize on every opportunity, it needs to have a set of core elements and features. NFC payments are the obvious must have feature, but increasingly that appears to be just the tip of the iceberg in what we are seeing being stuffed into most upcoming NFC mobile wallets these days. Accumulate’s package of services is robust, but it doesn’t have a stand out feature we haven’t seen in an NFC mobile wallet before – neither is it lacking any feature you would want.

As far as mobile payments are concerned, the Accumulate ME platform will support payment situations that include point-of-sale that POS payments will utilize NFC as well as other methods of payments. PayPal will also use Accumulate’s person-to-person payments in the European country, which is odd because we know that PayPal developed its own P2P NFC transaction app for Android a couple of months ago. Online payments will, of course, also be a feature of the upcoming PayPal NFC mobile wallet and Accumulate also states that man-to-machine and remittance payment features will also be included.

PayPal mobile wallet: mobile banking

PayPal is attempting to bring its online banking and payments to the real world. From what we can see in the agreement PayPal has signed with Accumulate, PayPal is looking to become a paired down bank. Accumulate describes the service that will be provided by their Mobile Everywhere platform in the Swedish PayPal NFC mobile wallet as “a mobile channel for all transactional and informational services.” PayPal has made a lot of acquisitions in the past year that places the company in a unique position to provide transactional capability to merchants in nearly every medium. It makes sense that the company is looking to transfer its identity from an online payments services to a full blown financial institution that is based online but that also interacts with the real world. In a lot of ways from what we can tell, PayPal’s ascension from the web to the real world is following the model laid down by the NFC technology, which also combines the virtual and real worlds.

PayPal gets mobile security in Sweden from Accumulate

One of the biggest hurdles NFC and mobile payments face is educating consumers about security and actually building in sufficient levels of security to services offered. Accumulate will be providing security to the PayPal NFC mobile wallet for the Swedish market. That security will be based around providing Swedish consumers with secure logins, electronic signing and eID using mobile. Accumulate hasn’t explained security any further at this point but we expect that to be a focus of future press releases that will educate consumers on the safety aspects of using NFC mobile wallets.

Other services Swedish consumers can expect to see in the upcoming PayPal NFC mobile wallet

Accumulate states that it will integrate information services into the upcoming Swedish PayPal NFC mobile wallet. The company also mentions a secure credit card, we are not sure whether that would be a virtual credit card account like Monitise and Citi / Google are offering, but we feel it is a pretty good bet that PayPal would go in that direction. Swedish consumers can then also expect NFC ticketing, couponing and and loyalty card features which are becoming the norm in NFC mobile wallets.

What makes what Accumulate has to offer so powerful is that it works on multiple mobile OS systems including:

• Android
• Blackberry
• iPhone
• Java
• Symbian
• Windows

What has caught our eye is the inclusion of iPhone, or iOS, to this list. Does this mean that Apple is indeed incorporating NFC into its iPhone 5? Or is it just that PayPal will release a version that does everything but the NFC portion of its mobile wallet functions? Rumors were circulating a month or so ago that Apple and PayPal have teamed up for an NFC mobile wallet. We hope that’s true. We only have a few weeks to wait until we have that answer, but there’s still time for a little speculation. PayPal is looking to be deploying NFC mobile wallets on a market-to-market basis and we have known for sometime that PayPal has aggressive ambitions on NFC payments. If the Swedish NFC mobile wallet is representative of what we will see around the globe, PayPal looks set to do very well with its NFC mobile wallet as long as they do not have massive fees for using its services like they do within eBay.