“The effort will encourage the use of mobile wallets like Masterpass, Mastercard’s cross-channel digital payments service, and offer a merchants a simple means of getting set up to accept such payments.”
IDEMIA and Mastercard have teamed up on an initiative to encourage mobile payments with merchants in the Middle East and Africa region.
The firms are working with Network International, a United Arab Emirates-based merchant acquirer, which will work with its merchant members to enable NFC-based transactions using Android smartphones. IDEMIA, meanwhile, is working with 1,800 financial services organizations and mobile operators to offer “an end-to-end mPOS contactless service,” according to a statement from the companies.
The effort will encourage the use of mobile wallets like Masterpass, Mastercard’s cross-channel digital payments service, and offer a merchants a simple means of getting set up to accept such payments. Merchants need only to download an app and create an account with a payment service provider, and then they’ll be able to start accepting contactless payments without the need for new POS hardware.
Of course, there is already substantial support for NFC payments in at least some parts of the Middle East, which Visa is now seeking to leverage in promoting a new biometric payment card solution in Lebanon. But IDEMIA’s mPOS service could offer benefits beyond simply offering customers an alternative payment method, with IDEMIA asserting that it “will also offer a queue-busting feature where merchants can enable their customers to avoid queues and cash exchanges at sporting, music and other events.”
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