Great progress was made by the Financial Services Technology Consortium's RFID group at its first meeting on Sept. 29, according to John Fricke, FSTC chief of staff. The group's goal, he explains, is to set standards by the end of the year for various uses of radio-tagging: to track cash and vital documents traveling between banks, to track equipment inside banks, and to facilitate contactless payments and other aspects of mobile banking, for example. For RFID to be of real value, Fricke adds, tags used by Bank A must be easily read by Bank B.
When FSTC, the New York-based standards body, announced its plans for RFID in July, early industry participants already represented more than half of the country's deposit accounts, according to Fricke. Since then, additional banks have expressed interest in codeveloping standards for the use of radio frequency identification, he notes.
BS&T's Elite CIOs Report: Technology Leadership in Banking