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Visa, Samsung and First Data team on dongle-less mPOS payments

Samsung, Visa and Fiserv unit First Data have teamed up to make the mPOS dongle a thing of the past, replacing it with a software-based system that lets merchants accept contactless payments of any amount on their handsets without the need for any additional hardware.

The SoftPOS system uses the NFC functionality in a merchant's smartphone or tablet to let them accept payments from contactless cards as well as NFC-enabled handsets and wearables.

Visa is bringing its contactless capability, while Fiserv offers settlement of transactions via a mobile app and Samsung provides security protocols in both hardware and software, as well as the mobile devices.

SoftPOS is being showcased at the IFA tech fair in Berlin before a pilot begins in Poland later this year ahead of a wider Emea and Apac rollout.

"SoftPOS, has been designed to meet the current and future needs of consumers and entrepreneurs and will change the way people make daily payments, facilitating the convenient, quick, and secure processing of contactless transactions,” says John Gibbons, head, Emea, Fiserv.

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Visa Fiserv, Inc.

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Payments

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Security

Keywords

Cards Mobile & online banking Eftpos

Editorial | what does this mean?

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Comments: (4)

A Finextra member 09 September, 2019, 09:14

2 likes

So now customers will be asked to read the card via NFC and punch their pin on a mobile phone belonging to a merchant or other seller? No security issues aroung "fake" phones that only log card details + pin in order to hit mag stripe only atm:s in less developed countries?

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A Finextra member 09 September, 2019, 15:56

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Agree with previous post - is this a realistic use case?

Current mPOS patterns are NFC/QR scanned and processed on the payer mobile device. The seller mobile device only need to see payment verified.

Huge fail is ignoring tokenization benefits of cardless mobiel payments. The goal should to remove the physical card from a mobile micro-merchant payment acceptance altogether.

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Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 10 September, 2019, 13:10

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Key is Merchant Account. IMO these POS replacement solutions are trying to solve a non-existent problem.

All new credit cards in India are NFC contactless now. Below INR 2K, there's no need for PIN (or signature or any form of payer authentication). I must've used my contactless credit card at nearly 100 merchant establishments so far. While most merchants themselves don't know it, their POS machines are NFC enabled and my below INR 2K payments have gone through in the so-called TAP mode without PIN.

Point is, if the Merchant is big enough for an Acquirer Bank to issue a Merchant Account, issuing an NFC POS terminal is not a big deal. POS replacement is a solution seeking a problem for those merchants.

OTOH, if the Merchant is not big enough to be issued a Merchant Account, POS replacement solutions like these can't enable such a Merchant to accept card payments UNLESS they also act as Merchant Aggregators a la SQUARE and offer a sub-Merchant Account to such Merchants. Are they? Do they?

In India (and China), such micro-Merchants are fully geared up to accepting digital payments via apps (linked to bank account, credit card or debit card) via QR solutions that, leave aside POS, don't need the Merchant to have a POS replacement smartphone like these.

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A Finextra member 10 September, 2019, 14:32

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Quite possibly the most awful idea ever. Instead of the push-payment model used in billions of transactions everyday, these three bright firms full of intelligent people create a pull-payment card scheme that taps a physical card against a micro-merchant mobile phone - how innovative...(sarcasm)