French Government to launch a Forum on Mobile Contactless Services

Luc Chatel, the French Secretary of State for Industry and Trade announced yesterday at l’Echangeur the launch of the “Forum for mobile contactless services”.The aim of the Forum is threefold:

• Build a Business Case for NFC at the national level
• Foster standardisation and interoperability of NFC technological and organisational interfaces
• Set an ambitious agenda for NFC in France and foster convergence of NFC services: trans port, payment, loyalty, ticketing, couponning, advertisment.

Check out this video (in French)

This forum will gather all industry players and have them agree on a common platform and a business model which is today the main hindrance to NFC roll-out.

What makes this initiative relevant is the focus of the goverment on the value added of NFC for the final user. The Forum will have to demonstrate how NFC will benefit to the consumer and make his life easier – and most of all cheaper…

One can predict that the main difficulty of this forum will be to coordinate so many players with different interests and agendas, and most of all to convince handsets manufacturers to participate, cooperate and deliver…