NFC-based payments
MasterCard is joining forces with Everything Everywhere, the parent company of UK mobile operators Orange and T-Mobile, to develop a suite of mobile payment solutions, reports StrategyEye. As part of a five-year development deal, the companies will launch contactless NFC-based payments which will allow consumers pay for goods by tapping their credit cards on an in-store reader, and will eventually extend this to include money transfers and rewards. The partnership, which will extend MasterCard’s m-payment services to 27 million UK Everything Everywhere customers, is its latest in Europe, following similar agreements with Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Turkcell in Turkey, as competition for consumer loyalty continues to rise.
The agreement continues the partnership with Orange, which produced the QuickTap NFC payment service and pre-paid debit cards. It is believed that the companies are working on a service that will let customers pre-load money onto a MasterCard app, and pay for goods and services using their smartphones or tablets. With many consumers still wary of linking their mobile devices directly to their credit card accounts, as with m-wallet services from providers such as Google and Visa, commentators suggest that pre-paid options are more likely to lower the barriers to mobile payments and encourage more consumers to start using their mobile devices to pay for goods.
There is a feeling that MasterCard will also follow the likes of Square and PayPal, by developing services aimed at letting smaller businesses take mobile payments. “MasterCard’s vision is of a world beyond cash, where consumers and small businesses alike can benefit from payments using smart technology,” says MasterCard president Marion King. The partnership follows on from similar deals in the space, such as Starbucks and Square or PayPal and McDonalds, as payment companies, retailers and mobile operators start teaming up to bring mobile payments into the mainstream.
NFC-based solutions are gaining momentum worldwide, with Juniper forecasting that more than one in four consumers in the US and Western Europe will pay for goods in-store using an NFC-enabled mobile device by 2017. This is a substantial increase from just 2% of consumers using NFC services in the region this year, anticipating a boom in NFC payment solutions over the next few years as more devices supporting the technology come to market.
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