Building the Bridges -- A Proposal for Merging Different Paradigms in Mobile NFC Ecosystem

In late 1990s. the multi-application initiative was put forward to have multiple applications on a single smart card. This would have enabled a cardholder to accumulate all of her smart card based applications (e.g. banking, telecom, and transport etc.) on a single device. However, despite the initial fervour for the multi-application smart card initiative, there were no wide spread adoption of this model. Nevertheless, the Near Field Communication (NFC) has reinvigorated the multi-application initiative again. In this paper, we will analyse why the multi-application smart card initiative failed to materialise a decade ago and whether this time around it will succeed as a viable model or not. The NFC trials being conducted basically rely on the existing ownership architectures, which can create market segregation and thus reducing the potential revenue generation capability. We propose a possible approach that avoids market segregation, increase revenue generation, and provide flexibility, robustness and scalability to existing ownership architecture.