Canadian Vending Machines to Take mPayments

The Canadian National Vending Alliance (CNVA) is getting ready to bring mobile payments to vending machines across the country.

To that end, the coalition has announced that it has partnered with PayRange, whose BluKey dongle can be installed in vending machines to enable contactless smartphone purchases via the PayRange app, which accepts all major credit cards and can also be funded via Android Pay and Apple Pay. In a statement announcing the move, CNVA President Steve Tremblay explained that “with more people becoming increasingly cashless, we realized we needed a mobile payment solution to bring to all our machines.”

It could prove to have been a prudent step forward. In the US, vending machine solutions provider USA Technologies recently announced findings suggesting that a properly advertised Apple Pay functionality could actually boost revenues through self-service POS terminals. And that, of course, suggests that consumers are increasingly interested in using their mobile devices for payments.

On the other hand, Apple Pay is perhaps the best known mPayment app in the world, and is relatively popular; far fewer consumers will already have the PayRange app when they go to make a purchase at a vending machine. Still, it’s a payment option that some will appreciate, and points to a future in which further mPayment capabilities are introduced at increasing numbers of vending machines and other self-service POS stations.