Source: Asia Payment Systems
Asia Payment Systems, Inc. (BULLETIN BOARD: APYM) today announced that DFS has confirmed its intention to use the APAYcard system - as recently implemented in the Okinawa Galleria store - in its initial foray into China at the Meilan Airport on Hainan Island. Meilan is the eighth busiest airport in China.
Hainan is commonly referred to as "China's Hawaii" due to its tropical climate and abundance of sandy beaches. This has made Hainan increasingly popular with newly wealthy Chinese and international tourists. Visitor numbers are expected to top 3.5 million in 2005, contributing $446m in earnings to the island. Hainan recently played host to the Miss World beauty pageant and is set to make this an annual event.
The card processing solution is based on Asia Pay's middleware that provides seamless connectivity to banks in China via taking XML messaging from the retail POS system and routing it over IP to the banks.
"The Hainan installation is one of the key steps in our mission in developing credit card solutions for China," said Matt Mecke, President & CEO of Asia Payments. "We are pleased that DFS has shown its faith in our solution following the successful Okinawa Galleria installation in December.
"Asia Payments' IP-based solution allows retailers to be independent of financial organizations and able to go to market for card processing discount rates, and thereby reduce their cost of doing business and add to the bottom line without any customer impact."