On October 27 and 28, the W3C Web Payments IG ran its first face to face meeting, as part of TPAC.
The agenda was split in various sections. The first day was dedicated to reviewing various specifications from ISO, X9 and a few other standardization bodies. We also reviewed existing work at W3C, on the Recommendation Track (Web Crypto WG, NFC WG, Sysapp WG), in Community Groups (Web Payments CG, Credential CG) and future work in areas like trust and permissions (see the recent workshop on this topic).
We then discussed our initial scope, and in particular, our focus on wallet, that the group is calling for now “payment agent.” The group first decided it will first address the person-to-business case, where someone is paying a bill issued by an organization (private or public, which includes person-to government payments).
Then the group decided to focus on convergent payment solutions, developing a wallet framework that will support both online and brick & mortar store payments. Finally one of the key work items will be security and how to increase security of credit card payments on the Web by enabling tokenized payment and push-based payments. Push-based payments are payments initiated by users: the merchant sends a bill to the customer who then sends an order to his payment system provider to pay the merchant. All the parties in the room agreed on the need to move out of exchange of credit card information for payments, and enable these new approaches through open standards. It was clear in the room that secure hardware storage has a big role to play here, particularly secure elements for both emulating credit cards and for managing identity and credentials securely.
The group has created two task forces too begin work on a detailed roadmap identifying technology gaps and opportunities for standardization:
- The first task force will take a bottom-up approach, identifying the list of scenarios that a payments framework should be able to address. The task force with work on requirements, design criteria and use-cases that will enable the design of a wallet architecture. The task force will first review various use-case documents produced by various W3C and non-W3C groups such as the W3C Web Payments Community Group, and X9 use-cases for ISO 12812 specifications.
- The second task force will have a more top-down approach and will work towards proposing a disaggregated architecture based on the discussions we had during the meeting.
The IG will have a teleconference on friday 7 november, and the next face-to-face meeting in Q1 2015. We will try to co-locate with a conference that is attracting group members, and we may go for a 3 days meeting.