When Apple failed to include a Near Field Communication chip in the iPhone 5 last week some saw it as a signal that NFC was immature and that consumers are not ready to embrace contactless payments.That's not the case. Contactless terminals are now common in Australia's supermarkets, entertainment venues and even taxis. Cabcharge has already reported that a fifth of all its Visa and MasterCard payments are now made using NFC.Apple's continued recalcitrance regarding NFC - it was originally tipped to include NFC in the iPhone 4S - more likely indicates that it is still working out how to keep contactless payment   revenues within its own "walled garden" in much the same way as it controls iTunes' cash flow.Meanwhile, demand for contactless payments continues to rise. In July, Juniper Research predicted that the NFC retail payments market would exceed US$180 billion globally by 2017 - more than seven times what is expected to funnel through NFC this year. Some banks, of course, haven't waited for Apple. Commonwealth Bank's Kaching mobile payment application makes use of an iCarte NFC-equipped case to allow contactless mobile payments from iPhones.Other banks are embracing alternative devices. Last month, Westpac announced an internal trial of a contactless payment system - using NFC technology - in Android smartphones. In partnership with Optus and Oberthur Technologies, Westpac will allow 100 customers with a debit MasterCard to turn the phone into a contactless payment device. (It has previously tested consumer reaction using an NFC sticker pasted onto a smartphone).At the heart of the current trial (which Westpac hopes will go live in 2013) is Oberthur's Trusted Service Manager platform, which allows the data held on an EMV debit card to be stored in the secure element of the phone's SIM card (which is where Optus comes in). The Oberthur Trusted Service Manager (TSM) provides the technical plumbing able to write to and link the secure element on a phone (be that on a discrete NFC chip or on the device's SIM card) with the mobile service providers that may make use of this secure element. These include banks as well as transport authorities and operators of loyalty programs.In a financial application, the secure element is used to store a bank's payments app and also the security credentials of the user. This is done in much the same way as the chip on an EMV debit or credit card stores the information. There's generally around 100 kilobytes of storage space on a SIM's secure element, so - in a manner akin to a physical wallet that can store multiple different physical cards - the smartphone can become a digital wallet, with the secure element storing information for different financial institutions and for other users. Clive Whincup, chief information officer for Westpac, said he believed that TSMs will play a key role in contactless mobile payments, but cautions that "TSM will be a very small market - it won't be able to sustain a large number of them.""What will differentiate them