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Our team is developing a payment infrastructure that provides for payment via smartphone with NFC technology.

For Android no problem as we used HCE; while as far as iOS is concerned we have come to the conclusion that the best solution, given the strong limits on NFC technology imposed by Apple, is the use of NFC-enabled Passes.

We have collected several information unfortunately very fragmented as on the net and on the Apple documentation itself not there is a lot of space on the deepening of this type of Pass. I know the implementation is under NDA, but we need to understand which way follow in order to at least start the tests.

With regard to the above, I list the points that are vital for the continuation of the work:

  1. We have already requested the NFC certificate through the appropriate form but we have not received any response yet. There is a way, a particular form that the request must have or a sum to be paid so that the request for the certificate can be processed faster?

  2. When the certificate is obtained, how should it be used? As already mentioned, the implementation is protected by NDA, in fact I was interested understand who I should talk to or how to get Apple's documentation.

I thank in advance to those who know how to answer these doubts.

Vag
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  • What is the scale of your solution? Do you require a Financial Services License? Most jurisdictions regulate e-wallet / stored value cards. Loyalty and ticketing are the easiest areas to get approval. Apple will typically only engage with financial institutions for anything involving cash or credit. If you feel that you meet these criteria, find your local Apple World Wide Developer Relations manager and ask for an introduction to the local Apple Pay team. – PassKit Jul 29 '20 at 05:44
  • @PassKit thanks for the comment. Our infrastructure is a private circuit that gives participants the opportunity to pay for goods and services through an privative card, which we have decided to also extend for payments through smartphones with NFC technology. We can see everything as a loyalty circuit. Do we need to interface with Apple as financial institutions? – Vag Jul 29 '20 at 09:00
  • I'm not able to answer that, but if your programme already exists and you are simply looking to digitalise it, then you stand a fair chance of being successful. Best thing you can do is try to connect with someone in your regional Apple Pay team. – PassKit Jul 30 '20 at 04:47

1 Answers1

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You are right, the entire process is under NDA.

I applied, like yourself and also reached out to a Developer Evangilist in Apple. I was told that the process was outside of their control and that you just had to be patient.

When you get the certificate from Apple, it will include an entitlement that enables the NFC support. I believe you just use the cert as normal when creating the pkpass bundle.

As I understand it, Apple will provide all the instructions to you if they approve your NFC request.

You can embed information within the pass that is sent via the NFC tag.

I’m afraid I can’t be more helpful.

Tomas McGuinness
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