Blue Code, which is used by banks such as Raiffeisen and Hypo Tirol in Austria and the German Sparkassen Group, is a token-based payment scheme incorporated directly into banks’ mobile payment apps that can be used for e-commerce, m-commerce, point of sale transactions and even vending machines. The 20-digital tokens generated are for one-time-only use and expire after a few minutes, providing high levels of security. The solution works with all types of smartphone devices and can be integrated seamlessly into retail reward schemes, allowing customers to automatically collect loyalty points.

Blue Code won the judges’ prize at last year’s Innovation Jam Final in Lisbon. What particularly impressed the judges was the fact that the solution receives no sensitive data, or information about the customer. The solution simply generates a token and receives a unique user ID from a bank’s core banking system. In this way, there is no hacking risk making the solution extremely secure. In addition, there is no risk that Blue Code will build up a valuable dataset that could put it in a position to disintermediate its banking clients; all of this data goes directly to the banks.

Commenting on the launch, Ben Robinson, Chief Strategy Officer at Temenos, said: “The MarketPlace offers Temenos customers access to highly innovative and value-added solutions that are pre-integrated with their core banking system. One of the ways we find these innovative solutions is through the Innovation Jam contest, which we are running again between March and May this year, and which Blue Code won in 2017. What makes Blue Code as unique as a mobile payment provider is that they are truly on the side of banks, helping them to provide a great payment experience at the same time as enabling them to hold onto all the transactional information that is so critical to generating customer insights.”

Chris Pirkner, CEO of Blue Code, added, “My previous startups served the music industry at the time that Apple and Google revolutionized it, becoming the principal distributors and in turn capturing a significant portion of the profits but more importantly the consumer journey and all related usage data. I foresee the same disruption could happen to banks. For banks to hold onto distribution of their services, they will need to hold the payment customer journey in their banking apps. Without that customer interface, banks won’t be the ones helping customers make smarter financial decisions and they’ll lose out to others who can. Blue Code stops this from happening. As well as allowing banks to retain more of their fee income, we enable them to keep payment in the mobile banking app and thus retain all payment information. Blue Code works on Android and iOS, is PSD 2 compliant, instant payment ready and pre-integrated with T24 so Temenos customers can deploy extremely easily.”