Tag: nfc technology

Cardtek teams with Trevica to expand mobile commerce

The  Cardtek group, a provider of payment systems and services around the world, has entered into a partnership with Trevica, a subsidiary of MasterCard. Trevica is a payment processing firm based in Poland. The company has been attracting significant attention in recent months due to its capabilities in mobile commerce, which are backed by MasterCard. As mobile commerce grows more famous around the world, the need for mobile payment services increases, creating opportunities for companies looking to provide such services and accommodate the demands of consumers.

New NFC-based service to be introduced to Trevica

Through this partnership, Cardtek will work to establish an NFC-based mobile commerce system for Trevica. The system will leverage NFC technology to make mobile payments possible across a wide range of platforms. Trevica will use this new system to help facilitate mobile payments for European banks and other organizations that are interested in engaging mobile consumers on this level. While the system is designed to make mobile commerce more available throughout Europe, it may fall short due to the low availability of NFC-enabled mobile devices.

NFC technology continues to prove problematic

NFC technology is widely considered to be a staple of mobile commerce. The technology provides a way for financial information to be access over very short distances, removing the need for physical forms of currency, such as cash or credit cards. Many of today’s mobile commerce services are based on NFC technology, but the availability of mobile devices equipped with this technology is low. Smartphones and tablets that do not use NFC technology cannot be used to facilitate mobile payments. Because NFC-enabled devices are not in high supply, the mobile commerce sector has grown slowly over time, leading many of the companies and organizations interested in this sector to seek out other forms of mobile commerce.

NFC may yet have a future in mobile commerce

Despite the problems associated with NFC technology, mobile commerce remains a very popular notion, especially among tech-savvy consumers that are constantly tethered to their mobile devices. As the demand for mobile commerce services grows, the supply for NFC-enabled devices also increases, making it more likely that more consumers will engage in mobile payments in the future. Partnerships like that between Cardtek and Trevica aim to take advantage of this trend.

Mass transit users in Romania will be able to use their smartphones to pay for their passage.

The Bucharest mass transit system in Romania has just announced that, starting this month, it will make it possible for NFC technology enabled smartphones to be used in order to use mobile payments for purchasing travel fare.

This is meant to appeal to the rapidly growing number of smartphone using commuters in the city.

The Bucharest mobile payments announcement came from the system’s operator, Metrorex. The reason that NFC technology enabled smartphone systems will be implemented throughout the service following a successful trial period at seven different stations in the city. The company determined that the popularity of the transactions merited an expansion of the program throughout every station in the city.

Certain wireless service subscribers will have access to the NFC technology and text mobile payments for fares.

Though this may expand in the future, at the moment, Orange and Vodafone wireless carrier subscribers will be able to text a message to a special number that places the fare charge on the smartphone user’s account. That customer is then texted a message as confirmation.

This comes at a time that a service in India’s city of Chennai has also announced that it will be using NFC technology when it opens its rail system in 2015. That system will not be using the text method like the one in Bucharest.

By using the text based mobile payments services, it means that the transactions won’t be available only to individuals who have NFC technology embedded in their devices. This is important as the tech is only currently available in a small percentage of devices. Text opens up the opportunity to the majority of device carriers. This metro service currently has a network of 51 different stations throughout Bucharest.

Every year, the system transports over 170 million passengers, according to the statistics provided by Metrorex. During the pilot for this fare transaction program, there were over 10,000 validations that were reliably and successfully processed. The data regarding the number of expected users for this year or regarding NFC technology transactions has not yet been released.