NXP Semiconductors and Sequent Software this past week announced a collaboration to increase the use of mobile devices in transit, access control and hospitality applications, according to a press release.

Sequent has licensed NXP's MIFARE DESFire and MIFARE4Mobile V1.01 and integrated them into the Sequent Platform, enabling consumers to access potentially millions of credentials for use in real-world environments with their mobile devices.

"Our new agreement with NXP allows us to tap into the huge installed base of MIFARE and provide a massive amount of card-based applications into mobile devices," said Hans Reisgies, CTO at Sequent. "It opens up opportunities for transit agencies, hotels and other organizations to effectively leverage mobile devices as the cards and keys of their customers. From now on, consumers will always be able to have these cards with them, securely stored on their smartphones so they can easily ride trains, enter office buildings, open hotel room doors, validate at parking ramps and make payments."

Sequent said its Token Service Platform supports hardware secure element security and other security appliances in connected devices. This enables them to offer more widely the use of MIFARE-based credentials, including on smartphones that do not have a native MIFARE implementation on the secure element, according to the announcement. With this flexibility, Sequent said it can support more card types and emulation standards, making them available in the smartphone apps consumers already know and use, which in turn greatly simplifies and fosters efficiencies in a wide variety of industries.