The multisided secure mobile wallet platform that can make mCommerce happen in Europe

Project Information

PASSCLUB

Grant agreement ID: 697631

DOI

10.3030/697631

Project closed

EC signature date 3 November 2015

Start date 1 November 2015

End date 31 October 2017

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 2 708 750,00

EU contribution

€ 1 896 125,00

Coordinated by

TORO DEVELOPMENT SL
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PASSCLUB (The multisided secure mobile wallet platform that can make mCommerce happen in Europe)

Reporting period: 2017-05-01 to 2017-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

TORO’s objective is to unlock Mobile Commerce throughout Europe, while enabling the incumbent players in each of the markets to keep their position among themselves in a newfound balance, and move maximum activity to the mobile. After years of isolated experiences carried out by Telcos and Banks, resulting in 55 failed mobile wallet initiatives across Europe, it appears that only an open, secure, cost-effective, neutral, fully scalable mobile wallet platform with a “platform model”, has the capacity to federate the incumbent players willing to address the opportunity of mobile commerce (in-store with NFC, and online), and create the necessary user adoption.
Passclub is a central, neutral, versatile and independent commercial platform, with extensions possible in every market that syndicates the incumbent players of national Mobile Commerce ecosystems, allowing them to share a unified technical platform (developed, operated, and maintained by TORO) and to enable their business on the mobile with the highest possible level of interoperability, scalability and security.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the second reporting period Toro has been focus on developing Passclub Spain(technically and commercially) following the new scope defined during the reporting period 1. Following feedback from previous reporting period, the main effort has been done in the marketing and business development areas as well as on sales and communication.
WP1: Project Management
In term of project organization, due to financial constrain, Toro had to downsize the number of people working on it.
At the same time, to support the new commercial and marketing strategy (i.e focus more on Passclub than Agora Wallet), the development resources (especially on mobile) have been reassigned to Passclub product development more than Agora wallet product development.
WP2: R&D
- Loyalty widget: A new functionality of the widget allows the user to include its physical QR and barcode based loyalty cards. The user just has to scan the card with the barcode reader included in the widget to have a copy of his card in his Agora wallet. This functionality allows to onboard merchants who already have a loyalty card and do not want to deploy a punch card type of loyalty.
- Integration of Tecnocom HCE payment librairies: following the MOU signed with Tecnocom, it has been decided to integrate their payment SDK into the wallet client. This allows the Passclub platform to be ready for integration with financial institution using Tecnocom cloud based EMV payment platform.
- AkamiManage (Wallet Manager): The Wallet Manager has had some major improvements with the integration of couchbase framework which allows a better synchronization between the wallet manager and the wallet client.
- Flash sales functionality: this function has been specified and development has started. It includes an integration with Addon Payment Gateway (see WP3)
WP3: Marketing and Business Development
During the first reporting period, they were a strong emphasis on Business Development to promote the Platform, create partnerships and kick-start Agora Gracia.
Now Agora Gracia is up and running with more than 400 registered merchants, the business development effort focus on onboarding wallet providers into the platform and securing major partnerships with important players.
- Following the MOU .signed with Tecnocom, Toro has enterd a partnership agreement with Tecnocom aiming as doing join technical development.This partnership is currently under review for final signature but already effective.
- We finalized a partnership agreement with Addon Payments a payment service provider owned by La Caixa.
- Transport: a new European strategy is currently put in place for the transport stream through a partnership with Wizway a joint-venture created between major players (SNCF,RATP, Gemalto and Orange). A MOU is under signature with the objective of integrating our respective solutions in order to address the European public transportation market.
- The Agora Gracia initiative got a lot of traction from various small merchant associations.
Passclub outside Spain
Effort has also been done to promote the Passclub concept and platform outside Spain to prepare the next commercial steps (extension and duplication of the platform in other countries).
- Passclub Europe: Discussion have started with a big European search engine company sharing the same philosophy and vision than Toro: providing European citizens European services and tools that can be a credible alternative to those similar provided by the GAFA. The creation of a J-V is under discussion.
- Passclub Africa: at the end of 2016, an opportunity to set up a platform for the largest PanAfrican bank, arises. Negotiations are quite advanced as they would like to launch before the end of the year.
WP4: Sales and Communications
Following the same strategy shift than WP3, Sales and communication had shifted progressively from an Agora Gracia centric effort to a more global Passclub promotion effort.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Within the first 9 months of the project, Toro has achieved the development and deployment in production of a flexible, scalable, customizable, and secure mobile wallet platform.
Flexible as the platform is built around a set of APIs implementing standard protocols acknowledged by the industry to integrate and expose services. Furthermore, our SDK tools allows to quickly build services in HTML5, Javascript and CSS and deploy them on the platform. Service providers can manage the life-cycle of their widgets independently from the Wallet life-cycle, bringing them the full flexibility they need to develop, deploy, test and correct their widget to quickly adapt their offering in to the Wallet users.
During this period of the project, Toro has focused in finetuning the platform and supporting the launch of the first wallet (Agora Gracia).
The commercial effort has been focused to extend the Agora Gracia kind of wallet to the whole Catalunya region as well as following up with La Caixa and explore other opportunities outside Spain. Because commercial discussions and market take off are taking longer than expected, an extension of the project duration (18 months to 24 months) has been requested by Toro and granted by the EU SME organization.

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