Starbucks launches pay by app for iPhone users in the UK

US international coffee company Starbucks has added pay by app capabilities to enable UK iPhone users to pay for drinks with their phones.

Starbucks customers will be able to scan a unique barcode on their iPhones at the till so that their accounts can be charged. The app, however, does not allow users to either pre-order or specify their drinks electronically.

The service is available to owners of Starbucks' loyalty card, and synchronises their account and balance information with their iPhone so they are charged the correct amount. Furthermore, the app’s loyalty scheme allows customers to qualify as gold level members to get free drinks.

In December 2011, Starbucks saw the number of transactions carried out via its mobile channel exceed 26 million since the beginning of 2011 when its mobile payments program was launched.

Cashless Lagos

Central Bank of Nigeria enlists Ingenico as 'cashless Lagos' experiment begins

Nigeria's central bank has kicked off its 'cashless Lagos' project, introducing limits on how much paper money people can withdraw and deposit in a bid to encourage the transition to electronic payment methods.

 

Last year the central bank set out a range of policies designed to wean the country off expensive and risky cash in favour of electronic money, arguing that the dominance of paper has big cash management, security and money laundering implications.

Lagos State is acting as the testing ground for the policy, and citizens will now face a daily cumulative limit of N150,000 for cash withdrawals and deposits with corporations told to stick to a limit of N1000,000.

However, the charges levied for exceeding these amounts will not come into force until 31 March amid concern and confusion over the plans, with the central bank also issuing a statement clarifying that it is trying to reduce, not eliminate, paper money.

The CBN argues that it wants: "To drive development and modernisation of our payment system in line with Nigeria's vision 2020 goal of being amongst the top 20 economies by the year 2020. An efficient and modern payment system is positively correlated with economic development, and is a key enabler for economic growth."

To help make electronic payments more accessible, CBN has selected French vendor Ingenico for the provision of point-of-sale terminals. Guaranty Trust Bank, Zenith Bank, United Bank for Africa, First Bank, First City Monument Bank, Oceanic Bank and Unity Bank have between them already purchased 14,000 Ingenico machines for deployment this year. As the project is expanded to the rest of Nigeria, Ingenico claims it could end up supplying hundreds of thousands of terminals over the next four years.

Gansirey Seck, MD, Ingenico Nigeria, says: "Ingenico is very pleased with the success obtained in a short timeframe in Nigeria. Taking customers beyond conventional payment through value added services on the POS will greatly contribute to the sustainable development of electronic payment in Nigeria."

US Migration to EMV Chip Technology

Find out why the US is finally ready to join the rest of the world and implement EMV into it's borders.

Most of the world has fully migrated or is in the process of migrating to EMV chip technology for debit and credit payments. According to EMVCo, approximately 1.2 billion EMV cards have been issued globally and 18.7 million POS devices accept EMV cards as of Q1 2011. This represents 40.1 percent of the total payment cards in circulation and 71 percent of the POS devices installed globally [EMVCO2011].

Given the prevalence of EMV chip technology in the rest of the world, many have questioned if and when the United States would move to EMV. U.S. financial institutions started issuing EMV chip cards to their frequently traveling customers; however the country seemed to be a long way off from acceptance [Gemalto2011]. All of this changed on August 9, 2011 when Visa announced plans to speed up chip migration and adoption of mobile payments in the United States. Visa announced a three-part acceleration plan [Visa2011]:

• Expand the Technology Innovation Program to Merchants in the U.S.
• Build Processing Infrastructure for Chip Acceptance
• Establish a Counterfeit Fraud Liability Shift

With this announcement from Visa, the United States payments landscape is no longer a future of magnetic stripe technology, but one of EMV chip technology and contactless and mobile payments. This paper will examine why the timing is good for EMV in the United States, and will discuss implementation and cost considerations for merchants and issuers.

Click here to download a free copy of The Migration to EMV Chip Technology by Gemalto white paper.

Biometrics in Banking

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By Lockerz

There is an increase in the use of biometrics in banking for client-facing applications. Turkey, Brunei, Nigeria and Poland are just some of the countries that have already announced biometric ATMs, for example. The use of biometrics at the till for payment is also on the rise. Some cite the fact that there has not been a massive up-take in the use of biometrics in consumer facing applications as evidence that the technology does not yet function to an adequate level of performance. Every large biometric deployment I have been involved in has entailed rigorous and exhaustive testing to clearly demonstrate accuracy performance against clearly and aggressively pre-defined test parameters, in real-world environments, using customer data; I don’t expect financial customers would be any less arduous. I do agree that lab testing / data is insufficient, and solution providers who are unwilling or unable to demonstrate predictable and repeatable accuracy SLAs in real-world environments should be treated with caution. Is a biometric system fallible? Yes. The question is, is it less fallible then existing precautions already in place, and does the deployment of such a system, in simple financial terms, demonstrate a clear ROI. Again, the answer is: Yes. Rather, I believe that the thus far reluctance in Western societies to deploy such systems en masse for consumer identification is more due to the banks’ concern of how such systems will be perceived by their clientele; the UK populace, for example, is ever suspicious of Big Brother, their governments and large institutions. However, these “perception barriers” are already lowering, and there is mounting evidence that public opposition, where clear benefit is realised, is eroding. Banks are now increasingly becoming aware of the value of biometric identification, of both their internal staff and their external clientele, especially in the area of high net-worth individuals and high-value transactions, and I expect we will see many exciting developments in identification solutions for this market.

To Be or NFC that is the question

At the end of 2010, the predictions made by Forrester were that Near Field Communication (NFC) would start to come into its own in 2011, though they had noted that it would be far from mainstream by the close of this year.

Now that it’s a year later, the predictions are starting to come in for next year, and this year’s use of NFC is starting to be reexamined in order to make the forecasts. In 2011, it has been estimated that between 35 and 40 million smartphones enabled with NFC have been shipped worldwide. Many of the top mobile manufacturers shipped devices with NFC, though Apple is the most notable exception to that rule.

Although this does look promising for the future, it should still be recognized that overall, only a very small percentage of the overall mobile device shipments include NFC capabilities. In fact, less than 1 percent of mobile device owning consumers have a product that includes NFC.

This has left many retailers wondering if it will be worth their while to invest in the point of sale (POS) reader products for NFC, considering that they can be very expensive, and the number of shoppers that use the technology may not be there yet. It is likely that this type of contactless payment service will take a few more years to become mainstream – though pilot programs are popping up here and there.

Equally, contactless payment is not the only benefit available from NFC. Currently, marketers believe that the true value to the technology is that occurring before and after the purchase of the product; for example, providing consumers with discount coupons, loyalty points, and other types of rewards relating to their purchase.

The reality of shopping! What about contactless?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sk7cOqB9Dk

Twitter - SQUARE - Dorsey

Latinia, an independent software vendor (ISV), specialized in infrastructure products for asynchronous type corporate notifications (mobile or instant messaging, email, Twitter's DM, push notifications), has recently introduced the concept of 'tweet banking'. According to Oriol Ros, Marketing Director of Latinia "for many financial institutions today, talking with their clients through any channel they choose is a strategic maxim. That is why Twitter, in vogue and with impressive take-up speeds is now a priority channel, first for observation and then as a means to exploit communication and business."
As Ros says, "we should note that what we are talking about is not, at least from our end, of Twitter as an open-channel for corporate communication as is used universally today, albeit incipiently, with many initiatives." Latinia strictly proposes the use of Twitter as an alert channel, via direct messages (DM), where the convenience of the clients prevails, being able to choose which channel to use to receive status of their accounts, cash withdrawals, etc., whether via SMS, push-notes or Twitter. In Latinia we have called it 'tweet banking'. To this respect, Latinia has introduced the latest innovation of its infrastructure product LIMSP© during this past year, after the implementation of push notifications, working on opening to new asynchronous channels on its service delivery product line-up.
Twitter, will have - and really already has - a greater presence in financial institutions, but the majority only use this channel to transmit contents, principally Press Releases and other corporate information. This limitation is due to inertia and its own characteristics as a channel where the tendency is for open communications, something over which the brand has little control of. Latinia opens another means, as the company understands Twitter to be another channel of choice based on the axiom of getting personalized and relevant information to the client, over and above the specific technological limitations - 140 characters and, in the case of DM, a daily limit of sent messages. Such information is of private nature, which is why Latinia has chosen to work with DMs and not with open communications.
Moreover, Latinia talks of tweet banking as the company did of SMS Banking, e-mail banking, instant banking, etc., on their day. The unstoppable proliferation and fragmentation of channels to help the financial institutions manage their business is a challenge equal to the potential it represents, and moreover, Latinia is very comfortable working with asynchronous channels. Twitter is still, though less and less, associated with young users, indeed future banking clients, but similar to the 35-44 year-old band where the take-up is massive. With tweet banking Latinia proposes the use of this channel based on the unequivocal, private relationship between bank and client - it is enough for the latter to be a follower of the former-, enabling the sending of private and personalized contents, with no one else being privy to them.

About Latinia

Latinia is an independent software vendor (ISV), which specializes in infrastructure product development for asynchronous type corporate notifications (mobile or instant messaging, email, Twitter's DM, push notifications), utilized mainly by leading and distributed globally financial institutions institutions (banks, savings banks, processing and payment systems), public institutions, government and service providers, leaders in their respective segments and industries.
For more than 10 years now, Latinia (created in 1999) has been focusing its efforts of innovation on discovering new possibilities offered by the so-called asynchronous channels, and in transforming simple events into notifications and subsequent multichannel messages (alerts). Using an onion as example, LIMSP© is adding layers of value to an initial core, thus transforming it into a business opportunity, converting each message into something unique for the customer, due to the relevance attached to the same and based upon the context in which it arises.
More information available through http://www.latinia.com/


SOURCE Latinia

2011- Review of the Year of Mobile Payments

'12/21/11' - James Wester - Mobile Payments Today

At the beginning of the year, 2011 was heralded as "The Year of Mobile Payments." Many analysts predicted that by the end of the year we would be well on our way toward a wide adoption of some form of mobile money. They expected consumers to have a plethora of choices, and it would not be uncommon to see someone whip out a phone instead of a wallet when it came time to settle a bill.

Obviously, that's not the case. Plastic is as prevalent as ever. But even though we haven't ditched real wallets for their mobile equivalents, a lot did happen in the world of mobile payments in 2011:

Starbucks
The story of mobile payments in 2011 begins with Starbucks and its ingenious mobile payment application. Eschewing fancy tech for relatively pedestrian barcodes at the point of sale, the Starbucks app is a tidy little mobile payment method that does what it does with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of utility. It's simple to use and fast at the point of sale - two qualities mobile payments will need to supplant cash and cards. Additionally, by making its mobile payments closed-loop, and keeping the transactions on its own systems, Starbucks didn't need to partner with a carrier or card brand to complicate things.

The app has become the early standard for mobile payment success and has demonstrated that customers will adopt mobile payments at the point of sale. Rolled out in January, the app was used for 3 million transactions in its first three months – and that was before it even had an Android version. In 11 months the app has now accounted for more than 26 million transactions at Starbucks locations across the U.S. It has been made available in Canada now and will be launched in the U.K. and Ireland in January.

Square
While Starbucks was letting customers pay with their mobile phones, Square was getting merchants paid with their mobile phones. With a streamlined app and clever credit card reader, Square solved a real problem for small businesses and made it simple for even the tiniest merchants to accept credit cards.
Gauging by Square's numbers, there were a lot of those tiny merchants looking for a solution. So far Square has registered over one million merchants and is processing around $11 million per day.
Square still has some issues to solve, most notably in encrypting transactions from end-to-end, but they get credit for making payments interesting in 2011. Add in Square's iPad-based cash register and mobile wallet solutions launched in May and you have a company that's rethinking the way merchants and customers interact at the point of sale. That may be why Square has wrapped up $137 million in funding, including investments from Visa and Sir Richard Branson, and has a valuation of $1 billion.

Start-ups
Square isn't the only start-up rethinking the way we pay for things. Another prime example is Dwolla, a Des Moines, Iowa-based mobile payment company. In March, Dwolla launched services aimed at getting consumers to give up their cards. Like Square, Dwolla wanted to end the byzantine rules and fees imposed on merchants by credit card companies. Its solution: get rid of credit cards altogether. Dwolla lets customers pay from prefunded accounts at the point of sale using a phone's GPS to place the customer in merchant locations. And all Dwolla charges is merchants is 25 cents for every transaction over $10, no complicated interchange tables and fees.

Other mobile payment start-ups entering the market this year include iZettle Cimbal, TabbedOut, PressPay and a host of others. It's more than likely that many, if not most, of these start-ups won't succeed in the long run. That's the nature of start-ups. (For instance, Bling Nation, a mobile payment start-up that garnered considerable attention last year, suspended its services in June to "reevaluate its business model.") But one of these companies may have just what it takes to cause a major disruption to payments and be the next PayPal.

PayPal
As for PayPal, 2011 witnessed its attempts to go from being only a provider of online payments to a player in the offline payment world. Ninety percent of retail in the U.S. is still carried out in "old-fashioned" brick-and-mortar stores, and PayPal is intent on getting a piece of those transactions.
In July, PayPal's president Scott Thompson predicted the demise of the physical wallet in 2015 and the company seems to be actively working towards making that happen. PayPal's parent company eBay made several acquisitions in the mobile payment space, most notably direct carrier biller Zong, and PayPal forged alliances with NCR and mFoundry to provide mobile banking and financial services. Additionally, PayPal unveiled an offline strategy to eventually allow retailers the ability to accept PayPal at their brick-and-mortar locatons. The company even opened a temporary store in Manhattan to show retailers just how its offline offerings will work.

The Card Brands
Mobile payments in 2011 hasn't been just about start-ups and disruption. As many of the mobile payment start-ups can attest, making a payment happen at the point of sale is no easy task and the major card brands - Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover - have a head start. 2011 showed that the card brands know the future is mobile and they were active in trying to extend their influence over that channel
American Express launched Serve, a mobile payment platform that offers offline, online and peer-to-peer payments. Visa released its own peer-to-peer platform and mobile payment strategy built around connecting mobile money programs in developing markets. MasterCard partnered on several mobile payment programs including the Quick Tap program in the U.K. and Google Wallet in the U.S. And even Discover was active in mobile payments as the original partner to sign on with Isis, the U.S. mobile payment joint venture of Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile.

The Mobile Network Operators
Not willing to sit back and be "dumb pipes" while all those mobile transactions crossed their networks, the wireless carriers made their own play for mobile payments in 2011. The pull of mobile payments was so tantalizing that mobile rivals announced this year that they would work together. Competing mobile operators in France, Germany, the U.K., Italy, Taiwan and elsewhere formed joint ventures to create national mobile payment networks. At this point, most are still figuring out how to work together with only France's Buyster actually online.
Isis, the American version of the mobile payment JV phenomenon, continued working this year toward an expected 2012 launch. Among other announcements the company formed partnerships with the major card brands, a mobile wallet provider and handset manufacturers. And while Isis' own product is still trying to get off the ground, that doesn't mean it's not impacting the market. Isis partner Verizon Wireless requested Google Wallet be disabled on one of the a handset, likely in an attempt to hamper an Isis competitor.

Google Wallet
And as for that competitor, May saw the launch of Google Wallet, a real, honest-to-goodness "tap and go" mobile payment solution for everybody. The company assembled all the necessary pieces to make a mobile payment happen at the point of sale including a carrier (Sprint), handset manufacturer (Samsung), card brand (MasterCard), TSM and merchant acquirer (First Data), and card issuer (Citi). Add in other companies like numerous point of sale manufacturers and retailers to accept Google Wallet and the effort was enormous. Google pulled it off in less than a year.
Google hasn't publicly discussed how many consumers have downloaded Google Wallet or are actively using it, but even if the numbers are modest, what Google accomplished by being first to market with a working mobile payment solution is not.
Even if 2011 didn't live up to the hype of being the inflection point where mobile payments took off, there were plenty of stories this year to show that mobile payments are coming, albeit slowly. It may not have been the year in mobile payments, but it certainly was a year in mobile payments.

Square Beware!

ROAM Data Launches Newest Secure Mobile Card Reader with Three Times More Device Coverage Than All Competitors Combined

ROAM Data, the company behind most of the encrypted mobile card readers shipped in the past year, and the leading mCommerce platform-as-a-service provider, announced today that it has launched its latest secure mobile card reader, the G3X. The G3X is ROAM’s third generation mobile reader and their best to date, it supports hundreds of devices, from iOS, Android and Blackberry, to PCs and Macs, covering three times more devices than all other competing readers combined. This enables Merchant Service Providers to compete with the best technology for a whole new segment of mobile merchants and small merchants previously untapped, a market that companies like Square are aggressively pursuing.

“We are committed to providing our partners with industry leading mobile commerce solutions, the new G3X is the latest product in our pipeline of products to come, which includes NFC and EMV readers for 2012, and a suite of mobile commerce solutions from mobile checkout, to mobile offers to mobile wallet,” said Will Graylin, CEO and Founder of ROAM Data. “We are technology geeks that really know about mobile and payments and how that intersection can deliver new value to merchants and consumers. Our goal is to build the most advanced, cost effective, and secure solutions for our customers to win market share today and stay ahead tomorrow.”

(ROAM Data CEO: Mobile Commerce Can Help Acquirers Can Win Merchants)
ROAM Data’s mobile card readers have been chosen by more Merchant Service Providers than any other based on its quality, security and compatibility resulting in the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The G3X represents even lower TCO because its increased device compatibility means more signups with the same marketing spend, lower customer service cost, and lower reader cost based on ROAM’s high production volume. ROAM has sold the highest number of encrypted mobile readers in the world in 2011 with more than 400,000 units to its growing list of customers including companies like Intuit, North American Bankcard, Sage Payments, NPC, Total Merchant Services, First Data, Chase Paymentech, Global Payments and others. ROAM’s clear leadership position in the market has just gotten stronger with the launch of the G3X.

About ROAM Data
ROAM Data is the leading mCommerce Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider extending both physical Point of Sales (POS) and eCommerce solutions to the mobile environment, to help merchants win customer spend and loyalty. ROAM’s platform includes software, hardware, & services, from payment applications to peripherals, and from end-to-end security and payment gateway, to boarding and support services, as well as development tools that enable both turnkey or custom mobile commerce solutions for our Merchant Service Provider partners. Our partners can white-label our full solution in weeks, or brand components such as our readers to use a-la-carte to fit their existing applications.
Examples of ROAM applications include ROAMpay, that turns merchants’ mobile devices into secure POS terminals to accept payment anywhere; ROAMcheckout for fast & secure mobile app and ad purchases; ROAMoffers and ROAMwallet, that enables merchants to deliver compelling and actionable offers to their consumers. ROAM also provides a set of tools (APIs, SDK, IDE) for developers to build their own mobile POS or eCommerce apps on ROAM’s platform.

A week in view in Payments

Saturday 24th  December 2011 - One more sleep till Santa!

 

Merry Christmas from the Monetize Team, now signing off until 2012, have a good one!

 

Wednesday 21 December 2011

UK contactless payments momentum gathers pace

21 Dec, 2011

UNX launches financial app store

21 Dec, 2011

Sepa migration deadline set at February 2014

 

Tuesday 20 December 2011

UK banks scrap currency feesFollowing an Office of Fair Trading probe, British banks have agreed to ditch some of the fees they charge people for buying foreign currency.

 

20 Dec, 2011

Brighton Collectables rolls out VeriFone mobile POS tech

20 Dec, 2011

PayPal trials mobile NFC payments in Sweden

Contactless is finally gaining traction

UK contactless payments momentum gathers pace

Nearly three quarters of British contactless users think that the technology will eventually become more commonplace than cash and 84% see cards as just a stepping stone to mobile NFC payments, according to a survey from Visa Europe.

In its second 'contactless barometer', the card giant quizzed 500 contactless users in the UK, 500 in Poland and 500 in Turkey. In the UK 73% agree or strongly agree that contactless technology will ultimately become more commonplace than cash, compared to 79% in both Poland and Turkey.

An even greater percentage of respondents - 87% across all three countries - are also convinced that "contactless will be instrumental in bringing mobile contactless payments to market in the near future".

There are still barriers to take up though - in the UK, the availability of contactless point-of-sale terminals has become a bigger preventative issue for people, cited 34% as a problem compared to 23% the previous quarter.

When acceptance has increased, usage has grown significantly, says Visa, citing the example of McDonald's, where the UK-wide rollout of terminals has seen 32% of UK contactless card owners use them to pay for fast food, compared to just 12% in the previous quarter.

The research also shows that for nearly half of Brits, communication received from their bank either before or after receipt of a contactless card plays a vital role in driving understanding and awareness of the new service. External advertising, through mediums such as TV and posters, is important to 14% of Brits and communication at the point of sale is an issue for 13%.

Mark Austin, head, contactless, Visa Europe, says: "With the number of contactless cards in circulation in the UK forecast to top thirty million by the end of next year and London 2012 set to showcase how the technology offers added convenience, the next twelve months provide an opportunity for the industry to capitalise on contactless payments and further connect with consumers."

From Russia with love

VeriFone Deployments in Russia Reach 1 Million Milestone

VeriFone Systems, Inc. (NYSE: PAY) today announced that the millionth VeriFone payment acceptance system in Russia was installed this month in the city of Tyumen by VeriFone International Partner (VIP) INPAS Company together with the West Siberian bank of Sberbank. The one millionth system was installed at Eldorado, the federal network of electronics and home appliances shops.

VeriFone has been active in the Russian market in strategic partnership with INPAS since 1995 achieving close cooperation with the largest financial institutions of the country and growing market share.
“Congratulations to the INPAS team on this milestone achievement,” said Soner Casur, VeriFone senior vice president, Southern Europe & Russia. “We’re delighted that together with INPAS we have achieved a 60 percent share of the Russian and former Soviet Union market to become the definitive leader in the field of transaction solutions and electronic payments.”
INPAS General Director Ilya Korobov hailed the milestone achievement: “We have been working with VeriFone for the past 16 years and expect to achieve the next million much more quickly because the rate of development of the banks’ acquiring business is growing impressively. After installing the one millionth system, INPAS began its quest for the next milestone by installing a VeriFone system at the regional retail network Arsenal+, which is symbolic, because future growth lies in expansion in the regions.”
INPAS Company was founded in 1994 and today it is part of a large IT holding group - INLINE Technologies Group. It has the largest in-house software development center for payment systems in Russia and the CIS countries and branches in Moscow, Kiev, Alma-Aty, Tbilisi and Budapest.
Sergey Maltsev, chairman of West Siberian Head Office, Sberbank of Russia, predicts that bank cards will completely replace cash in the not-too-distant future. The bank plans a substantial increase in the numbers of cards issued and the expansion of its acquiring network in Western Siberia.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 for VeriFone Systems, Inc.
This press release includes certain forward-looking statements related to VeriFone Systems, Inc. within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on VeriFone management’s current expectations or beliefs and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. Actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements herein due to changes in economic, business, competitive, technological and/or regulatory factors, and other risks and uncertainties affecting the operation of the business of VeriFone Systems, Inc. These risks and uncertainties include: our ability to continue the existing business relationship with INPAS for the Russia market, our ability to protect against fraud, the status of our relationship with and condition of third parties upon whom we rely in the conduct of our business, our dependence on a limited number of customers, uncertainties related to the conduct of our business internationally, our dependence on a limited number of key employees, short product cycles, rapidly changing technologies and maintaining competitive leadership position with respect to our payment solution offerings. For a further list and description of such risks and uncertainties, see our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. VeriFone is under no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any obligation to, update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions or otherwise.
About INPAS, (www.inpas.ru)
INPAS Company was founded in 1994 and since has successfully developed in the Russian and former CIS countries markets, including Belorussia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia. Today it's part of a large IT holding group - INLINE Technologies Group. INPAS has the biggest in-house software developing center in Russia & CIS countries (for EFT-POS terminals), over 300 successful EMV-projects, branches in Moscow, Kiev, Alma-Aty, Tbilisi and Budapest .INPAS has developed a complete line of application software for POS-terminals, ATM and external smart PIN pads. INPAS software solutions are based on the hardware platforms for equipment of the industry leaders - VeriFone, Glory. With leading technologies incorporated in the INPAS software solutions, mature maintenance and service system, INPAS has built a strong reputation as the leading company in the payment technologies market.
About VeriFone Systems, Inc. (www.verifone.com)
VeriFone Systems, Inc. (“VeriFone”) (NYSE: PAY) is the global leader in secure electronic payment solutions. VeriFone provides expertise, solutions and services that add value to the point of sale with merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems for the financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare vertical markets. VeriFone solutions are designed to meet the needs of merchants, processors and acquirers in developed and emerging economies worldwide.

Go Payment

Intuit GoPayment Now Allows Merchants To Receive Money On A Prepaid Visa Card     

Intuit has made an interesting move today with its mobile credit card reader GoPayment reader. Intuit is allowing merchants to keep and receive funds on a prepaid credit card as opposed to depositing the amount in a bank account.
Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment, which competes directly with Square, is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone).
Similar to Square, the GoPayment mobile payment app is free and the basic service has no monthly, transaction or cancellation fees, and offers a 2.7 percent rate for swiped transactions. Intuit and Square actually both eliminated the per transaction fee.
With the Intuit GoPayment Prepaid Visa Card, merchants and retailers can have the funds they collect with GoPayment deposited into their GoPayment Card account. They can then use the card to make payments online, in stores and withdraw cash at ATMs everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted.
So who does this arrangement work for? For smaller businesses or individuals who don’t have a business bank account and still want to conveniently separate the money they make with GoPayment from their personal finances, this could be a good option. Using the prepaid card can also help merchants start accepting payments quickly as there is no bank account required to sign up. Those who prefer using a business or personal bank account can still choose to have their funds deposited into their bank account. And for the millions of U.S. consumers who are “unbanked,” a prepaid Visa card allows them to accept payments for a business without a bank account.
This makes GoPayment especially friendly for fledgling entrepreneurs or businesses who want to accept payments but don’t have a business bank account.

Paris gets interactive NFC mailboxes

French postal service La Poste has added NFC stickers to mailboxes in the central Hotel de Ville area of Paris, allowing passersby to receive information on local services and providing La Poste with the potential to generate new advertising revenues.

La Poste, the French national postal service, has equipped mailboxes in Paris' central 4th arrondissement with NFC stickers that enable it to provide a range of new services to locals.
Tapping the stickers on the mailboxes allows NFC phone users to receive personalized, real time offers from local merchants, information on mail collection times at other mailboxes in the area, directions to the closest postage stamp sales outlet and the opening times and location of their local post office.
The new smart mailbox service also supports QR codes and has been developed by French NFC specialist Connecthings. The Connecthings system also enables NFC phone users to access details of local events, a map of the neighbourhood, bus service times and the location of bus stops and classified ads. Check-in services and information on local merchants are also available.
A video illustrates how the service works: