Ingenico’s new tech lets people pay by tapping cards on their smartphones

Woman sitting on bench holding Apple iPhone

We have contactless cards and we have NFC-enabled smartphones. Both are extremely convenient ways of paying. However, paying on smartphones without NFC until recently has been rather cumbersome.

The keyboard is too fiddly and card information page that comes up on the phone is too small to fill in comfortably – much harder at least than on a traditional computer.

This is gradually changing, especially since Apple has integrated its payment service, Apple Pay, into computers and internet browsers. Online payment through the likes of Android Pay and Apple Pay is expected to hit $8 billion by 2018.

Now, Ingenico seems to go one bit further and using cards’ chips to speed up payments made via mobile. Its new “experimental” contactless payment solution, TapHero, allows smartphones equipped with an NFC reader to read the payment data from the card’s chip and auto-populate all the fields required to make a mobile payment. An extra feature simulates a card-present payment, for increased security.

“Mobile commerce is here, and will continue to drive our industry forward. Yet we see many online businesses struggle to really take full advantage of that opportunity,” said Ludovic Houri, Vice President, Products at Ingenico ePayments.

TapHero, Ingenico says, can be easily integrated into a merchant’s checkout page and will automatically detect the presence of an NFC reader. Customers won’t have to download anything register their data or create an account to use the solution.

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