Money20/20: FIDO Alliance and EMVCo Are Developing Mobile Payments Specification

The FIDO Alliance is working with EMVCo to develop a new authentication specification specifically for mobile payments, the organizations have announced at Money20/20 in Las Vegas.

The standard will be designed to apply to mobile wallets and mobile payment platforms like Apple Pay and Android Pay, and it’s going to be developed as an extension to the Web Authentication specification currently being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The idea is to allow the kinds of FIDO-compliant devices used for web transactions to also comply with the Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method used by payment networks to enable mobile payments.

As FIDO Alliance Executive Director Brett McDowell explained in a statement, mPayment providers currently need to build their own CDCVM support into their apps—”a huge challenge given the fragmentation in the mobile ecosystem” —but the new specification “will enable mobile payment stakeholders to FIDO-enable their applications and get the added benefit of built-in support for CDCVM on every FIDO-compliant mobile device.”

The development follows the FIDO Alliance and EMVCo’s announcement this past summer that the organizations were teaming up to explore how FIDO’s standards could be incorporated into EMV payments, a collaboration that is clearly starting to really pay off.

(Originally posted on FindBiometrics)