Card selected for prepaid card loyalty programme

Users of au WALLET can also earn up to 3,000 points (equivalent to 3,000 JPY) by playing the game ‘au WALLET Welcome Gacha!’ at dedicated au shops. Users can experience this game by tapping their au WALLET cards to the NFC reader of a dedicated terminal. Those earned points can be used to replenish the au WALLET balance and online shopping as well as for purchasing mobile phones and mobile bill payment. An au WALLET application for smartphones and a dedicated website also allows users to charge their au WALLET cards, check remaining au WALLET balance and review loyalty points. The card holders can achieve extra points at more than 50 different retail shops, restaurants and entertainment venues.

Customers of KDDI can conveniently interact with their au WALLET cards through their NFC-enabled smartphones as MIFARE DESFire is NFC Forum Type 4 Tag compatible. MIFARE DESFire is based on open global standards for both air interface as well as cryptographic methods such as Triple DES and AES. It is compliant to ISO/IEC 14443 part 1, 2, 3 and 4 (Type A) and uses optional ISO / IEC 7816-4 commands. MIFARE DESFire is widely available from NXP and licensed partners for use on secure elements in mobile phones such as SIM cards and embedded secure elements. Full mobile support is provided by the MIFARE4Mobile Industry Group, which has standardised a single, interoperable programming interface to remotely provision and manage MIFARE-based services in NFC mobile devices, from over-the-air installation to end-user interaction via the user interface of the mobile phone.

NFC is a market-proven, standardised technology co-invented by NXP and Sony in 2002. NXP is at the centre of this ecosystem, fuelling its development by partnering with major handset manufacturers, mobile OS providers and applications developers. NXP is the No. 1 supplier to the Identification market globally, and leverages its leadership in contactless and security technologies to provide complete mobile transactions solutions: NFC controllers, secure elements in all form factors, NFC tags and infrastructure reader ICs. Nine out of ten top NFC smartphone manufacturers rely on NXP.

“KDDI’s au WALLET service underlines that NFC based applications are already widely accepted in Japanese markets,” said Ulrich Huewels, Senior Vice President, Business Line Smart Identification Solutions, NXP Semiconductors. “NFC provides a convenient and simple tap-to-interact which helps to push the customer experience to the next level. Cities like Bangkok, Dubai, Los Angeles, St. Petersburg and Valencia are already using NFC in combination with MIFARE based applications to increase the service for their customers.”