Towards an interoperable mobile wallet service

Abstract

Advancement in mobile technology, coupled with a market wide growth in mobile subscriber base, is encouraging financial, telecom and even third party operators to offer mobile payment services. In presence of a plethora of such services, an imminent problem is lack of interoperability across them. In this work, we address the challenge of interoperability by designing a wallet service built upon a concept of token. A token encapsulates a payment instruction, which can be of different types, such as instant, dated or installment payment. A token is represented by a Info-Matrix code, viz. Quick-Response (QR) code, thereby bringing in additional advantages in terms of user interactions with the wallet service. We present the lifecycle management of a token, beginning with token generation on user request, transfer of token, and acknowledged receipt and encashment of a token. This work presents an architecture for interoperable wallet service, along with the implementation of a system that demonstrates the use of QR-codes as standardized tokens for transactions. © 2013 IEEE.