SEMOPS - Secure Mobile Payment Service

Different approaches come to the market and try to address existing needs, but up to now no global solution exists. SEMOPS is a secure mobile payment service with an innovative technological and business concept that aims to fully address the challenges the mobile payment domain poses and become a global mobile payment service. (www.semops.com) The SEMOPS (Secure Mobile Payment Service) project is a two-year European Union funded project that was initiated at the end of 2002 with the aim to address effectively most of the challenges bundled with a mobile payment service, and develop an open, cross-border secure approach. SEMOPS has 15 participants from 4 countries and is based on the cooperation of banks and international mobile network operators (MNOs). The service concept is built on the credit push concept. Based on this model and combined with state of the art mobile technology, the SEMOPS project aims to develop a real time, user friendly mobile payment service, for virtual and real points of sale (POS) as well as for person-to-person (P2P) transactions on pan-European scale. The solution establishes new ways of interaction as it was required in between the actors, thereby relying on the already established traditional trust relationships between customers and his home bank or home MNO, supported by a unique business model that allows revenue sharing between the banks and MNOs. Several companies and standardisation organisations have showed interest and have joined the Special Interest Group of the project e.g. SUN Microsystems, IBM, Oberthur, PayCircle etc