The requirement would be imposed under Part 1 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which lets the CMA set binding conduct rules on firms it has designated as holding Strategic Market Status, a finding of substantial and entrenched market power in a digital activity. Apple received that designation for its mobile platform on 22 October 2025, and NFC access was flagged as a candidate intervention in that decision and in the CMA’s interventions roadmap for Apple of 23 July 2025. Responses close at 5pm on 17 November 2026, to mobilesms@cma.gov.uk, and Apple has confirmed it will not use confidentiality provisions to stop parties responding.

HCE or Secure Element, at the developer’s choice

Apple has historically reserved the NFC hardware and software on iPhone for Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. In October 2024 it opened a route in the UK and other jurisdictions through its NFC and SE Platform, but that route is Secure Element only. A secure element is a dedicated, tamper-resistant chip embedded in the handset which holds the credential and manages the NFC exchange locally, so a transaction completes without a network round trip.

Host Card Emulation inverts the model. The credential stays off the device on a remote server, which sends a limited number of one-time-use tokens down to the handset, and the card emulation runs in software on the application processor rather than on a secure chip. Android has supported HCE since Android 4.4 in 2013, and the consultation document is explicit that neither HCE nor SE was developed by Apple and that neither is specific to any platform or technology provider. Both ride the same 13.56 MHz high-frequency air interface, so to a reader at a terminal a tap is a tap. The RFID glossary covers the underlying terms.

Apple argued that any intervention should be confined to SE. The CMA is rejecting that, and its central evidence is an absence: two years after the NFC and SE Platform became available, it found no evidence of any NFC app launching in the UK using it. Mastercard Wallet Services was announced on the platform in July 2026 and Visa Token Service support for iOS secure element use cases in September 2026, but the CMA treats that as some movement against a need for much broader uptake. The counts of developers authorised for or applying to the platform are redacted in the published document.

Build time is the other half of the argument. Banks and fintechs already running HCE in the European Economic Area or on Android told the CMA they could repurpose those systems for the UK in two weeks to three months, against 12 months or more for a secure element build. A bank starting from scratch put HCE at 12 to 18 months and SE at 18 months or more. Applet certification, SE-specific code and the extra provisioning and credential lifecycle management are what stretch the schedule.

The European comparison is concrete. In July 2024 the European Commission accepted legally binding commitments from Apple to provide HCE-based NFC access for payments across the EEA free of charge, with supporting functionality including default wallet choice. On 9 December 2024, Vipps MobilePay, the Norwegian and Danish payments app, became the first developer anywhere to launch an alternative to Apple Pay on iPhone. PayPal followed in Germany in May 2025, Curve in June 2025, BBVA with BBVA Pay with Visa in Spain in October 2025, and Klarna with Tap to Pay across 14 markets in December 2025.

The stakeholder view is not uniformly anti-SE. Two banks said that if forced to pick one technology they would take SE for its better offline behaviour, though both backed a dual-technology approach, and several respondents treat SE as the value-added route for high-assurance credentials and standards that mandate a secure element.

The definition reaches well past payments

The draft defines an NFC Transaction as presenting, receiving, authenticating or verifying cryptographically protected information, for payment and non-payment use cases alike. It names in-store contactless payments, transit, account-to-account payments and stablecoin on the payment side, and digital identity services, loyalty cards, car and hotel keys and corporate badges on the non-payment side. That breadth is the part worth reading twice if you work in access control or credential issuance rather than payments: a physical access credential, a hotel key or a mobile employee badge delivered through a vendor’s own iOS app, instead of as a pass inside Apple Wallet, would sit inside the scope of the obligation.

Express Mode and Power Reserve: the transit parity clause

Paragraph 8 of the draft decides whether third-party transit and access apps are viable at all. It would oblige Apple to provide interoperable access to all of the iOS functionality used by Express Mode and Power Reserve. Express Mode is Apple’s feature that lets a compatible credential be used in a contactless transaction without the user unlocking the device or authenticating the transaction. Power Reserve keeps those credentials working for a limited period when the handset has too little power for iOS to run normally.

Those two features are what make a phone work at a ticket gate. Without them, a third-party transit app would demand an unlock and a biometric check at every tap, which fails the dwell time a gate allows. The draft would let a third-party app holding default NFC status complete unauthenticated taps wherever Apple Pay and Apple Wallet would not require authentication, and transact with the screen on or off.

Fees, defaults and the compliance clock

Pricing is where the fight will be. Apple’s structure for the NFC and SE Platform combines a periodic provisioning fee per credential with a per-transaction fee. Stakeholders told the CMA that makes entry commercially unviable: one said the per-transaction charge means the effective cost of a bank-enabled wallet rises as average transaction value falls, which hits debit cards hardest; another said the economics break outright where a customer loads a card into a third-party wallet and then rarely uses it, because the transaction fee the wallet earns is lower than the fee it pays Apple. Concerns were also raised about the fixed-fee element and about charges stepping up above a user threshold. The per-tap figures card issuers actually pay are redacted in the published document.

The CMA’s position is that those fees are too high to support viable entry, that the underlying technology was not developed by Apple and is often provided for free or with minimal fees by other mobile providers such as Google, and that it would therefore expect any resulting fees to be “low and substantially lower than Apple’s current charges”. Rather than set a price, the draft sets four principles each fee must satisfy: cost-based, value-based, flexibility and administrative simplicity. The value-based principle requires adjusting for Apple’s market power, and Apple must exclude costs relating to its own downstream products that use NFC access. The flexibility principle requires fee structures that reflect usage frequency and how revenue is generated per NFC tap, with developers able to switch between structures.

The rest is plumbing, and plumbing is where access remedies usually fail. Access must stay effective and of adequate quality, with no unjustified restriction through contractual terms, technical design requirements, app review or enforcement practices, and it must be continuous, with suspension allowed only on a credible threat of serious harm to iOS security, privacy or integrity, or to UK end-users. Developer commercial information could be used only in connection with providing access, ring-fenced from staff working on Apple Wallet, Apple Pay or any competing Apple product. UK end-users would also have to be able to set a third-party app as the Default NFC App, defined as the app iOS launches automatically on a tap unless a different contactless app is open on screen at that moment, and Apple would have to expose a Default Status API so a developer can check whether its app holds that status.

If imposed, the requirement would come into force three months after the final decision. Apple would file an implementation plan within one month, the first iOS version released after that decision would have to carry the necessary technical infrastructure, and compliance reports would follow every three months. The prize the CMA puts on the other side of that work: the UK accounts for roughly 11% of the global fintech sector, 58% of UK adults used mobile payments regularly in 2025 on UK Finance figures, and around 22 million people in the UK use Apple Wallet and Apple Pay at least monthly on the CMA’s estimate.

Read more at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6ad772868ef5e8a9fc8ed610/Consultation_document__NFC_access_.pdf

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

On the face of it that is a merchandising story rather than an RFID one. It is worth a second look. An electronic shelf label, or ESL, is a battery powered e-paper display with a radio on board, individually addressed from a central price system. An estate of 1.2 million of them is an estate of 1.2 million wireless endpoints on UK shelf edges, and on this particular label family there is an optional passive high frequency tag sitting alongside the radio.

What is actually on the shelf edge

The hardware comes from VusionGroup, the French listed retail digitalisation business formerly known as SES-imagotag, which says it serves more than 350 large retailer groups across Europe, Asia and North America. Asda has standardised on the 2.6 inch VUSION shelf edge label, one of the common sizes across the V100 and V300 series, so the model chosen sits in the mainstream of that range rather than at either extreme. Grocery Gazette reported better screen quality and readability as a factor in the choice.

Price data does not reach those labels over shop Wi-Fi. The VUSION family communicates on a proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol, bidirectional, using up to 11 channels, with radio coverage of roughly 25 metres from an in-store access point and 128-bit AES encryption with secure key exchange. Because the link is two way, a label confirms what it has been sent, which is how a retailer can be confident that the price on the shelf matches the price at the till. Each label also carries a blinking LED pick-to-light function, used for picking and for locating stock on a shelf.

Where NFC comes into it

That 2.4 GHz link is proprietary radio and not RFID in the sense most readers of this site use the word. The NFC option is a different matter. SES-imagotag labels can be ordered with an integrated passive NFC tag that complies with ISO 14443 and operates at 13.56 MHz, the standard HF RFID band. ISO 14443 is the four part international standard for proximity cards and their reader interface at that frequency, and it is the same air interface used by contactless bank cards and transit tickets, with a working range of a few centimetres.

Tap an NFC capable phone on a label that has the chip fitted and it redirects to https://nfc.ses-imagotag.com/<Label-ID>, so the tag resolves to that individual label’s identity rather than to a generic product page. Antenna position varies with label size, so the phone has to be lined up with the antenna rather than waved at the display in general. VusionGroup’s own product material pitches the shopper use case directly, describing labels that can be tapped or scanned to reach product reviews, nutritional scores, stock availability in nearby stores or alternative formats online.

One caveat matters here, and it is the honest way to report it. Neither Asda nor VusionGroup has stated publicly whether the NFC chip is populated in the specific 2.6 inch units Asda has deployed. The tag is a documented option on this label family, not a confirmed feature of this rollout. What the rollout does establish is the scale of the opportunity: a UK retailer specifying that option across an estate of this size would put an HF tag population in the millions onto shelf edges in a single programme. Further background on the technology sits in our NFC coverage.

What the labels do for the stores

The displays carry pricing, unit cost, weight and promotional information, and they also show ingredient and allergen information for customers, with expanded detail on bakery items where that has historically been awkward to print at the shelf edge. The operational case is the removal of manual repricing.

Matt Harrison, Director of Asda Express Central Operations, said in the September 2026 announcement: “By removing manual pricing tasks, we’re freeing up time for colleagues to focus on serving customers and keeping store standards high.” Roy Horgan, UK and Ireland CEO at VusionGroup, said the company was “proud to have reached this milestone with Asda” and expected to build on the partnership.

This is the end of a staged programme rather than a single push. An earlier phase announced on 3 October 2025 covered 250 Express stores at roughly 2,800 labels per store, more than 700,000 digital shelf displays in total. That phase followed a three month trial at Oxford Road in Manchester, with Castleford the first new-build Express to open with labels fitted from day one, and 20 further Express stores due to open before the end of 2025 with the labels in place at launch.

Who delivered it, and why the store count varies

Renovotec, a UK integrator specialising in rugged mobile computing and RF infrastructure, handled delivery and installation. HL Display supplied the rails and holders that physically carry the labels on shelves, baskets, hooks, chillers and freezers, an attachment supplier rather than a technology partner. Retail Technology Innovation Hub, reporting on 30 August 2026 from a LinkedIn post about the project, named a wider supplier list, adding Elecomm, MADIC UK and Evolve on infrastructure, with Daniel Pelissier as project lead.

That RTIH report puts the figure at more than 550 sites rather than 517, because it counts the Asda petrol station estate as well as the Express stores. The two numbers are counting different things rather than contradicting each other: 517 is the Express store figure in Asda’s own announcement. Anthony McCarron, Projects, Propositions and Communications Manager at Asda, described the work as a step change for customers and colleagues, delivered on time and on budget.

Cameras are the next layer

Asda is separately piloting shelf-edge availability cameras in five of its larger main-estate stores. The system identifies gaps, out-of-stocks, low inventory and misplaced products and alerts colleagues to replenish, with a wider rollout planned. That is the computer vision half of the VusionGroup stack, which alongside the labels themselves includes VusionCloud, Captana for computer vision and AI, Memory for data analytics, Engage for retail media and PDi digital signage. For an RFID audience the point is the direction of travel: shelf level identity and shelf level sensing are converging on the same infrastructure.

The wider UK picture

Asda is not alone. Waitrose announced a partnership with SOLUM in December 2025 to introduce electronic shelf labels nationwide, and Co-op has been replacing labels across 2,400 stores through 2026. Between them, UK grocery is quietly building one of the largest deployed populations of addressable, powered devices at the shelf edge anywhere in retail, with an HF tag option available on at least one of the major platforms.

Read more at https://corporate.asda.com/newsroom/2025/03/10/asda-rolls-out-new-electronic-shelf-label-across-express-stores

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Writing for FFX Now, Angela Woolsey reported that when a card is scanned near the bus doors, the RFID technology embedded in it allows the driver, via recently upgraded tablets, to see who the student is, their assigned bus stop, and where and when they board and leave the vehicle. FCPS told the outlet in a press release that “these simple taps will help the FCPS Office of Transportation know which students are on which school buses, improving safety and efficiency for one of the largest public school bus operations in the country”.

This is not a cold start. Per FFX Now, FCPS began testing the bus technology in summer 2025 and widened it to more drivers through the 2025-2026 school year. The tablets do more than register taps: they display the driver’s assigned route, assist with navigation when a road closure forces a detour, and relay data in real time to a dispatcher who can send help in an emergency, as Superintendent Michelle Reid explained in a video quoted by the outlet. FCPS Bus Driver Supervisor Lei Shi told FFX Now the pilot drew “positive feedback from the drivers, especially for the navigation functions”, adding: “I’m confident that when everyone knows how to use the system, gets used to it, it will be a very powerful tool.”

The parent-facing half arrives later this autumn. FFX Now reports that a new mobile app will replace Here Comes the Bus, giving families real-time updates on bus location and on boarding and alighting events. The outlet noted, pointedly, that FCPS was careful to frame the system as tracking the location of the student’s bus once they tap in, not the students themselves. Dr Reid made the same distinction in her own remarks, saying the ID cards for transportation “are not tracking cards”.

Every student gets a card, including those who never ride a bus, because FCPS intends to extend them to school meals and field trips. The cards are colour-coded by school and carry details of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline on the reverse, a requirement under Virginia law since 2023.

The supplier nobody named

Here is the gap worth flagging. Five local and regional outlets covered the launch, FFX Now among them, and not one identified a vendor. There is no supplier press release, and no company has publicised the win.

The trail runs through FCPS’s own material rather than any news coverage. In her Superintendent’s Weekly Reflections, Dr Reid described “a Mobile Data Tablet training session … this new technology (called ‘Tyler Drive’)” and noted that “more than 1,100 drivers participated in training”. The page is undated, but internal references place it around 1 February 2026. Tyler Drive is a product of Tyler Technologies of Plano, Texas. The replacement parent app, named “FCPS My Ride” on the district’s family page, matches Tyler’s My Ride K-12.

The contract is on the record too. FCPS School Board briefing papers dated 14 April 2023 list a non-professional services award to Tyler Technologies, contract 4400011204, for student transportation routing software at $838,750 a year, $3,355,000 in total, running to 31 December 2027 with four one-year renewal options. It came out of FCPS solicitation RFP 2000003294, which closed on 25 August 2021.

What remains unidentified is who made the cards. Tyler’s own Tyler Drive product page says the system “integrates with NFC or other student ID cards” and offers unassigned-stop alerts, which reads as integration rather than supply. Nothing published names the firm that printed and encoded roughly $260,000 of credentials for a division moving about 130,000 students a day across some 45,000 stops, and no systems integrator has been named either. FCPS’s own March 2026 board presentation attributes the work to FCPS Transportation Services and FCPS IT.

Which frequency, though

FFX Now says RFID. Tyler says NFC. FCPS has not confirmed an air interface, so 13.56 MHz HF/NFC is the likely reading rather than a settled fact.

As general technical context, the distinction matters operationally. An HF/NFC credential presented at a reader beside the door is a deliberate act: read range is a few centimetres, the child has to hold the card to the target, and cross-reads from a card sitting in a rucksack two seats back are effectively impossible. That precision is exactly what you want when the record has to say which child boarded, not which children were nearby. The trade-off is throughput and tap discipline, because every boarding needs an intentional presentation and a card left in a bag stops the queue. Passive UHF would read further and faster but brings stray-read risk in a metal tube full of children. The harder data-quality problem in any tap-based scheme is the tap-out: boarding taps tend to hold up well because the reader sits in the choke point at the door, while alighting taps are where records go missing and where a bus-location feed to parents quietly does the work the card was meant to do.

Read more at https://www.ffxnow.com/2026/07/23/fcps-to-roll-out-new-student-id-cards-for-school-bus-tech-upgrades/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The mandate says digital, not NFC

The Premier League’s own wording is deliberately technology-neutral. A digital ticket is one delivered electronically, most commonly to a mobile phone, and assigned to a named supporter registered with the club. The league’s stated rationale is anti-touting and fraud prevention, and it points at “hidden or rotating barcodes” as the security mechanism. Nothing in that language requires a radio.

Clubs could have complied with a rotating QR code and been done with it. A significant number did not. They went to 13.56 MHz HF, wallet passes and tap entry, because the operational problem they actually needed to solve was not fraud. It was throughput.

The two-year grace period for promoted clubs is not a softening of the rule, it is an acknowledgement that stadium ingress is a capital project. A club coming up from the Championship is not just buying a ticketing platform. It is potentially retrofitting reader heads in every turnstile lane, rewiring, revalidating egress procedures, retraining stewards and running a season of parallel operation before it can safely switch anything off. Two years is roughly one procurement cycle plus one shakedown season. It is a realistic number, not a generous one.

Where the fifteen actually are

“Fifteen clubs with NFC deployed to some degree” hides a wide spread of maturity, and the differences are the story.

Arsenal has completed the transition. The club is on 100 per cent digital ticketing at the Emirates and its supporter-facing FAQ set now explains near field communication to fans as a matter of routine, alongside separate iPhone and Android guidance. It is worth being precise about one thing that has been misreported elsewhere: 31 August is simply Arsenal’s first home fixture of the campaign, not an enforcement deadline. There is no cutover pending there. Note also that Arsenal’s FAQs still address a rotating QR code on Android, and explicitly rule out screenshots, which points to a dynamic optical fallback running alongside the NFC path rather than a hard NFC-only estate.

Tottenham Hotspur has taken the most aggressive position in English football. Working with ticketing platform FortressGB, the club is removing QR codes from digital tickets and passes entirely for 2026/27 and asking every fan to tap. The club’s own reasoning is refreshingly unmarketed: QR scanning causes delays, often because of low screen brightness, and QR is easier to duplicate and reshare. Spurs are updating stadium signage and giving turnstile operators extra training for the changeover, which is the detail that tells you they expect a behavioural problem, not a technical one.

Liverpool has been running NFC passes at Anfield for a while and has the most mature pass lifecycle of the group. Season ticket holders and members hold a pass in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet that automatically updates itself with the next fixture they are due to attend, so there is nothing to re-download between games. Passes for the new campaign were issued from 22 June. Liverpool sets a device floor of iPhone 6 and above plus most Android handsets, and the same pass doubles as proof of membership for retail discounts in club stores, which is a neat piece of credential reuse.

Manchester City and Crystal Palace are the two confirmed VTAP reader deployments, City at the Etihad and Palace at Selhurst Park, with fans directed to tap on a dedicated reader at the lane.

The reader layer nobody is writing about

VTAP readers are made by Dot Origin, a UK company with more than twenty-five years in the smart card and NFC business, working in partnership with Apple and Google. Outside the Premier League the same hardware turns up across every La Liga stadium, at FC Porto and at Ascot Racecourse.

The product line matters because it maps neatly onto how venues actually retrofit. There are embedded NFC reader boards designed to go inside an existing turnstile head, which is the difference between a firmware and bracket job and ripping out the pedestal. There are standalone indoor and outdoor access control readers for gates and hospitality doors. There are USB and Bluetooth desktop, kiosk and point of sale units, which is how the same wallet pass ends up being read at a merchandise till or a hospitality check-in desk. And there are hybrid heads that accept NFC, contactless RFID cards, barcode and QR in a single unit.

That hybrid capability is doing a lot of quiet work. Clubs are not starting from nothing. Most have an installed base of physical contactless season cards, staff and contractor credentials, and accreditation media that still need to be read at the same lanes. A reader that handles a wallet pass and a legacy HF card without a second head on the pedestal is what makes a phased migration survivable.

What actually happens when a fan taps

This is the part missing from every consumer write-up. A wallet ticket is not a tag and it is not a stored barcode with a radio bolted on. It is a cryptographic credential presented by the handset in card emulation mode over the standard 13.56 MHz HF interface.

On iPhone that exchange runs over Apple’s Value Added Services protocol. The reader broadcasts an identifier for the pass issuer it is looking for, the phone selects the matching pass without the fan having to open anything, and returns a payload encrypted to a key pair the venue controls. On Android the equivalent is Google’s Smart Tap, which negotiates a session key with the reader and returns a signed pass payload the same way. In both cases the reader is not “scanning” anything the user can see. There is no visual representation of the credential to copy.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the value that comes off the tap is not a static number, so intercepting one transaction does not give you a reusable ticket. Second, because the pass and its keys live on the device, the handset does not need a data connection at the gate. Network dependence sits on the venue side, at the reader and the validation host, which is exactly where a stadium operator can engineer redundancy. That is a materially different failure profile from a fan standing in the rain trying to load a web ticket on congested cellular.

The anti-touting consequence is the one the league cares about. A barcode, even a rotating one, is a picture, and a picture can be photographed off a screen and sold. A wallet pass has no picture to sell. Arsenal’s FAQs make the point to fans directly, telling them a screenshot will not get them through the gate, and Tottenham cite duplication and resharing as a reason for dropping QR entirely. Transferring a ticket then has to go through the club’s own transfer flow, which is precisely where a club wants the audit trail to sit.

Why throughput is the real driver

Consider the arithmetic of a 60,000 seat bowl. The overwhelming majority of that crowd arrives inside a 40 minute window before kick off, through a fixed number of lanes. Every second of average dwell time per fan at the turnstile multiplies out across tens of thousands of transactions into queues on the concourse and outside the ground.

An optical scan is a chain of things that can go wrong. The screen has to be awake, bright enough for the imager, held at the right angle and distance, and not obscured by a case, a wet phone, a glove or low winter sun. Auto-brightness fights you. Any one of those failures turns into a retry, a steward intervention and a stalled lane.

A tap has almost none of that. It is a proximity event over a few centimetres, it works in darkness and rain, it does not care about screen brightness or orientation, and on iPhone with Express Mode enabled it does not require the fan to unlock the device or open an app at all. Tottenham’s public reasoning and Manchester City’s turnstile upgrade programme point at the same conclusion: the queue, not the fraudster, is what pushed these clubs to radio.

The friction that does not make the press release

None of this is free. Liverpool’s own guidance carries a blunt warning: do not delete the pass from your wallet once it is downloaded, because it may not be possible to re-download it. Pass reissue is the hardest part of any wallet credential programme, and telling supporters to be careful is a mitigation, not a fix. A lost or replaced handset on a matchday morning is a box office problem, and every club needs a manned fallback path for it.

There is a device floor, too. Liverpool’s iPhone 6 and above line is generous, but it is still a line, and older or budget Android handsets with unreliable NFC stacks will produce a tail of failed taps for a steward to resolve at the lane. Any fan without a smartphone is dependent on club discretion. The Premier League has kept that door open, allowing clubs to issue alternative formats to supporters with reasonable grounds, including disabilities that make digital tickets difficult to buy or use. How generously individual clubs interpret “reasonable grounds” is now a genuine accessibility question, and it will be tested in public during the first few matchdays.

And a tap-only estate concentrates risk. Removing the QR fallback, as Tottenham are doing, removes the thing that saves you when a reader head fails or a phone will not cooperate. It is a defensible decision, but it moves the burden onto reader reliability, spares holding and steward training.

What to watch next

The opening weekend of 21 to 23 August is the first real load test of the mandate at scale, and Arsenal’s first home fixture, expected around 31 August, will be watched as an example of a completed transition operating at full capacity rather than as a deadline. Beyond that, the obvious next question is open loop. The readers going into these turnstiles already speak the same 13.56 MHz language as a contactless bank card, and hybrid units already handle physical HF credentials. Whether clubs move from a wallet pass to accepting the card the fan bought the ticket with, as transit operators did, is the interesting part of this story that has not started yet.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

That is because digital ticketing is no longer a club-by-club preference. Premier League clubs voted in August 2024 to make it mandatory, with a two-year phased transition running to the 2026/27 season, and clubs promoted into the league get two years of their own to comply. The league describes a digital ticket as electronically delivered, assigned to a registered supporter, and protected by “enhanced security features such as hidden or rotating barcodes”. The mandate is about digital delivery and supporter assignment rather than any one technology, so NFC remains a club-level implementation choice. West Ham has been running NFC entry at London Stadium for several seasons, which puts it ahead of the curve rather than scrambling to meet it.

What actually happens at the turnstile

An NFC wallet ticket is HF RFID, operating at 13.56 MHz and built on ISO/IEC 14443 Type A along with the ISO/IEC 18092 peer and card-emulation modes. The reader in the turnstile generates a short-range field, typically effective over a few centimetres, and the handset responds in card emulation mode. On iPhone and Apple Watch the credential sits in the device secure element and is presented over Apple’s Value Added Services profile, which relies on Enhanced Contactless Polling so the correct pass is selected and presented automatically without the supporter opening an app. Android handsets do the equivalent through Google Wallet and Smart Tap, with host card emulation removing the need for a physical secure element in the phone.

Two practical consequences follow. First, what crosses the air interface is a cryptographic exchange between reader and wallet, not a picture of a barcode. Second, once the pass has been downloaded to the device, the tap itself does not need mobile data or Wi-Fi, which matters a great deal in a bowl holding 60,000 people. The device does need to be switched on, and West Ham’s guidance is explicit that a pass showing as expired will still admit a supporter provided the ticket has not been shared or resold.

Why a tap beats a screenshot

The touting problem is really a copying problem. A static barcode is just an image, so it can be screenshotted, forwarded and sold as often as the seller likes, with the loser being whoever arrives second. Rotating barcodes narrow that window by regenerating the code every few seconds, but they still depend on the display, on screen brightness and on the fan holding the phone at the right angle. An NFC pass cannot be screenshotted in any useful sense, because the credential is provisioned into wallet storage bound to that device and the token presented is generated at the moment of tap. Combine that with one-use tickets that cannot be passed back out after entry, as West Ham enforces, and the secondary market gets harder to work.

There is a fairness caveat that clubs and the league both acknowledge. West Ham continues to issue physical Season Tickets on request to supporters over 65 or with accessibility needs, and anyone without a compatible handset can go through the Ticket Office. The Premier League’s policy allows for similar exemptions, including group bookings and supporters for whom a digital ticket is genuinely difficult to use.

For the RFID industry, the wider point is the reader estate. A mandate that pushes twenty clubs off paper has quietly funded one of the larger HF NFC access control deployments in UK sport, and every turnstile now certified for Apple VAS and Google Smart Tap is also a platform for cashless spend, loyalty and stadium access on the same 13.56 MHz interface.

Read more at https://www.whufc.com/en/fans/hammers-hub/ticketing/digital-tickets-on-matchdays

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

NFC goes into the jersey

The connected jersey element is the part of the announcement that matters most to the RFID and NFC industry. Under the agreement, every NLL player jersey will carry YinzCam branding alongside embedded NFC technology, which the two parties describe as bridging the live event and the league’s digital experience.

NFC is short-range HF RFID operating at 13.56 MHz. A passive NFC Forum tag inlay sits in the garment with no battery, drawing its power from the reader field of a phone held within a couple of centimetres. The tag holds an NDEF record, usually a URL, so a tap opens a web destination on both iOS and Android without the fan needing to install anything first. That is what makes garment NFC attractive for fan engagement: the interaction is instant and works with hardware every supporter already owns.

Putting a tag into apparel is a harder engineering problem than sticking a label on a box. Inlays destined for garments are normally encapsulated in a laminate or silicone carrier and heat sealed or stitched into a seam, hem or neck label so they survive wash cycles, tumble drying, pressing and the repeated flexing that sportswear takes. Antenna placement also has to keep the tag clear of any metallic trim or printing that would detune it. Neither the league nor YinzCam has said which tag type, chip or inlay supplier will be used, or where in the jersey the tag will sit.

The wider digital platform

The jerseys are one component of a broader stack. A new NLL mobile app with an NLL Fan ID, powered by YinzCam single sign-on, launches in November 2026 during NLL Faceoff Weekend, alongside an NLL Customer Data Platform that unifies fan data across league and club digital properties. Later phases add a redesigned league website, rebuilt club websites and apps, the connected jersey rollout and AI-driven features.

NLL Commissioner Brett Frood said the partnership “creates a connected League that delivers better experiences for fans, stronger tools for our Clubs, greater value for our partners, and a platform that can evolve for years to come.”

Kurt Hunzeker, NLL Executive Vice President, Commercial Operations, framed the commercial case around data and measurement, saying the aim is “creating new ways for partners to connect with fans while providing greater visibility into performance, engagement, and return on investment.” That is the logic behind a tag in a jersey: a physical touchpoint that can be tied back to an identified fan through the Fan ID and the CDP.

The deal also makes the NLL a live production environment for research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Game Research AI Lab (GRAIL), covering AI for officiating, broadcast production and player performance analysis. YinzCam founder and CEO Priya Narasimhan called it “an unprecedented, exhilarating opportunity for impact” for both the company’s platforms and the CMU lab. The partnership extends to NLL UnBOXed, the league’s grassroots programme, connecting youth participants to the same digital platform.

Read more at https://www.nll.com/news/national-lacrosse-league-and-yinzcam-announce-official-digital-engine-partnership/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The TraceCase sniffer provides protocol-level analysis of NFC transactions involving embedded secure elements (eSEs), UICCs, and contactless readers. Engineers at CISC can now decode multi-layered communication sequences in real time, quickly identifying protocol deviations and unexpected device behavior that would otherwise require extensive manual investigation. For a lab that routinely tests interoperability across mobile phones, wearables, POS terminals, and smart cards, this level of visibility into the protocol stack is a significant operational gain.

One of the most notable technical features of the TraceCase platform is its integrated H-field measurement capability. NFC operates at 13.56 MHz and relies on magnetic coupling between devices, which means that antenna design, metallic enclosures, and environmental shielding all have a direct impact on signal stability and communication reliability. The integrated H-field measurement allows CISC engineers to observe protocol traces and magnetic field strength simultaneously, correlating signal-layer behavior with protocol-layer events in a single capture session. This dual-layer insight is particularly valuable when diagnosing intermittent failures that stem from marginal RF conditions rather than software defects.

From a workflow perspective, the compact and portable form factor of the TraceCase unit fits naturally into CISC’s existing automated test setups. Engineers report faster setup times for signal captures, more granular filtering options during trace analysis, and shorter debugging cycles overall. These efficiency improvements translate directly into faster project turnaround times for CISC’s clients, who depend on the lab for comprehensive interoperability reports covering application, protocol, data, timing, and signal layers.

CISC Semiconductor operates one of the more established NFC interoperability testing facilities in Europe. The lab’s fully automated test environments simulate real-world communication scenarios using diverse counterpart devices, generating detailed reports with tabular data, graphical analysis, and optional low-level debugging information. The addition of COMPRION’s sniffer technology adds another dimension to this testing capability, particularly for clients developing contactless payment solutions, transit ticketing systems, and access control applications where protocol compliance and signal integrity are non-negotiable requirements.

The partnership between CISC and COMPRION reflects a broader industry trend toward more sophisticated NFC testing infrastructure. As the number of NFC-enabled devices continues to grow and use cases expand beyond payment into areas such as digital identity, device provisioning, and IoT configuration, the demand for rigorous interoperability validation is increasing. Labs that can offer combined protocol and RF signal analysis are better positioned to catch the subtle interaction failures that surface when devices from different manufacturers attempt to communicate in varied physical environments.

Read more at https://www.cisc.at/blog/comprion_sniffer/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

STMicroelectronics’ eDesignSuite is a well-established collection of design utilities that helps engineers specify application use cases, select the right IC or discrete component, simulate circuit performance, and prepare prototypes. For NFC and RFID designers, the suite is particularly valuable because it includes dedicated antenna design calculators for 13.56 MHz systems. The NFC Inductance calculator lets users input antenna geometry values to compute expected inductance, which is critical for tuning resonance frequency. The NFC Tuning Circuit calculator goes further, providing matching network component values for ST25R series reader ICs, including the capacitor values needed for Automatic Antenna Tuning (AAT) circuits.

This matters because STMicroelectronics has built one of the most comprehensive NFC/RFID portfolios in the industry through its ST25 product family. The ST25R series of reader ICs, including the ST25R3916 and the automotive-grade ST25R3920B, support multiple protocols at 13.56 MHz including ISO 14443 Type A and B, ISO 15693, and NFC Forum standards. On the tag side, the ST25DV dynamic NFC/RFID tags offer both a 13.56 MHz RF interface and an I2C connection to a host microcontroller, making them popular choices for IoT devices, smart labels, and industrial applications.

Ultra Librarian contributes its cloud-based library of over 8 million symbols, footprints, and 3D STEP models with vendor-neutral ECAD output. Engineers can pull verified component data directly into their PCB design tools without worrying about compatibility issues. This new collaboration builds on an earlier partnership between DigiKey and Ultra Librarian announced in February 2025, which integrated DigiKey’s myLists with Ultra Librarian’s UltraBOM tool for streamlined bill of materials management.

By connecting these three platforms, the collaboration creates an end-to-end digital workflow. Engineers can simulate antenna performance and circuit behaviour in eDesignSuite, access accurate CAD models through Ultra Librarian, and source components directly from DigiKey, all without breaking their design flow. For teams working on NFC reader designs or dynamic tag implementations using ST25 devices, this integration should reduce the friction between simulation, schematic capture, and procurement.

The announcement coincides with Embedded World 2026, held March 10-12 in Nuremberg, where DigiKey showcased products and demos including STMicroelectronics’ STM32N6 platform.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.