RFID Based Mobile Payments

No. Closed-loop venue credit is not a card or UPI transaction: the value sits in your own wallet ledger and is spendable only at your own stalls, so no card network, acquirer or payment gateway sits between the band and the till. That is what lets a tap settle in a fraction of a second, and what keeps the till working when the venue's internet does not. The regulatory position is a separate question from the technology. Whether your arrangement counts as a closed-system prepaid instrument, who may hold the float, and what your top-up and refund obligations are, are matters for your own compliance advice and for the RBI's prepaid payment instrument directions as they stand in 2026 — check the current position rather than relying on a vendor page. Identium supplies the credentials, readers and platform; the money-handling structure stays yours to establish.

An Android phone with built-in NFC reads ISO 14443 credentials at 13.56 MHz, so a vendor app on a phone can act as a till for a simple server-side wallet. Two things push most venues to dedicated readers. First, built-in NFC antennas are small and sit in a different spot on every handset, so tap consistency varies across whatever phones your vendors happen to own. Second, if the balance is written to the chip under keys, the app needs those keys and reliable write behaviour, which a mixed phone fleet rarely delivers. A portable HF reader such as the IDTS-HRP60 connects to a handset over an OTG cable and leaves the phone as the screen while the reader does the radio — order the read-write model, not the read-only one, and check its datasheet against your chip: the listed families are Mifare 1k, 4k, 2k and Ultralight, so confirm support explicitly if you are going the keyed route.

That depends on where the balance is held, which is why the wallet model is worth settling before you order bands. If the balance lives on the server and the band carries only a serial number, you block that serial and issue a replacement against the same guest record with the remaining value intact. If the balance is written on the chip so a till can settle with no live link, the value walks off with the band unless every transaction is also mirrored to a ledger — design that in at the start rather than bolting it on later. Either way recovery needs the band tied to a name, phone number or booking at top-up, because an unregistered band is a bearer credential and whoever picks it up can spend it. An optional PIN on higher-value taps limits the damage in the window before a guest reports the loss.

Yes, though usually with two chips in one band. The payment tap wants an HF 13.56 MHz chip read under ISO 14443 at a few centimetres. The gate lane wants a passive UHF chip — EPC Gen2, ISO/IEC 18000-63, marketed as RAIN RFID — read at a distance. Those terms describe the passive UHF side only; the NFC chip beside it is not a RAIN tag. India's allocation for that UHF side is 865–868 MHz, delicensed under the 2021 WPC short-range-device rules — the same band ETSI uses, so a European datasheet is not the problem; the mismatch to watch for is US-market hardware set to roughly 902–928 MHz. The UHF readers and antennas we supply are WPC-approved for India's licence-exempt UHF RFID band, and Identium is BIS certified. Single-die parts carrying both interfaces exist but are made-to-order inlays, so for a wristband two separate chips in a custom run is the practical route. They share no memory, so your software ties both identifiers to one guest record — settle that before the run starts.

Hardware and credentials are quoted against a written specification, because a few variables move the figure more than anything else. How many credentials, and in what material — silicone for reusable, multi-day wear against single-use Tyvek or PVC. Which chip family, since a serial-only NTAG or Ultralight band is cheaper than a keyed DESFire EV1 one. How many till points, top-up counters and gate lanes need readers, and in which form factor: compact, portable, desktop or worn. And how much of the software you want — live stall-level dashboard, vendor settlement reporting, guest top-up app. Our wristbands start at roughly Rs 15 per unit, with the final figure depending on material, chip and quantity; readers, encoding, printing and software are priced per project, and we do not publish per-project list prices. Send expected guest numbers, stall count and event duration so the quote can be built line by line against a real specification.