Hello, Public documentation for NFCPaymentTagReaderSession states that it is currently limited to European Union (EU). Could you please advise when will this restriction be lifted and NFCPaymentTagReaderSession be made available outside of the EU? Are there any other capabilites available to be able to read EMV card data via NFC on a financial services or card issuer's iOS mobile app? Thank you!
NFCPaymentTagReaderSession EU Restriction
Also, does NFCPaymentTagReaderSession permit a non-payment authentication read of a payment AID, in the US or elsewhere, and what entitlement does it require?
An alternative solution for interacting with payment cards if you are not eligible for NFCPaymentTagReaderSession is the NFC & SE Platform for secure contactless transactions which has a broader regional availability, but may have other kinds of restrictions. You can find out whether you would be eligible or that solution is feasible for your use case at the link above.
Thank you — that's helpful, and we want to confirm we understand the NFC & SE Platform correctly before pursuing it, because our data flow may differ from what NFC & SE states in the documentation: "Users of eligible iOS apps can initiate NFC transactions from within the app with compatible NFC terminals."
To be precise about our use case: in our app, the iPhone is the reader. The end user taps their own physical contactless payment card to their iPhone, and our app reads the card's EMV response data (e.g. the application cryptogram and related ICC data) for account verification. This is not a payment, and the iPhone is not presenting a credential to a terminal.
Outstanding question:
Does the NFC & SE Platform provide any capability for an iPhone to act as the reader — i.e. to read EMV data from a physical card tapped to the iPhone — or is the platform limited to the iPhone presenting a provisioned Secure Element credential to an external terminal? If NFC & SE is presentment-only (SE credential → terminal), is there any Apple-supported API, in the US or other non-EU territories, by which a third-party app can read EMV data from a physical card tapped to the device — or is NFCPaymentTagReaderSession (EU-only) currently the sole API for that data flow?
Thanks!