VISA PayWave

Empower customers to pay with the wave of their mobile phone is one way to get attention and automate sales.

VISA PayWave Transcript

What Visa is doing today at the show is highlighting our mobile payment capability where you will actually be able to take a phone in the near future, wave it in front of a PayWave terminal and make a transaction. We are actually utilizing an ice cream machine for the purposes of our demonstration so you are able to get a nice soft serve ice cream once you wave that phone in front of the device.

We chose to highlight PayWave today because from an infrastructure perspective it is really going to provide the rails for mobile payments. PayWave today is the ability to take a plastic card that is PayWave enabled and wave it in front of a POS terminal at a merchant and make payments under $50. Actually for gas stations it is up to $100 for a limit perspective.

So again, when you look at those PayWave rails that allow you to make that contactless transaction, there is no difference from a user’s perspective whether you wave a mobile device of a physical plastic card. So, the evolution of PayWave will see us in the very near future enabling mobile payment at the point of sale.

So as PayWave evolves from the plastic card form factor to the mobile form factor, there are some really unique opportunities from a security perspective because are you able to password enable that device so you won’t be able to activate the NFC antenna in the phone until you have put in the password. The intelligence, if you will, of that mobile device actually allows for a significant level of security that doesn’t exist in plastic cards today.

Visa recently approved 6 mobile devices for payment globally and that was with Visa Europe and Visa Inc. We have approved four Blackberry Devices (four RIM Devices), one LG device and one Samsung device. What that means is that we have actually offered those up to our issuing partners as form factors that they can utilize to put their banking credentials on. I think you are going to see a lot of movement in this space specifically in Canada in mobile NFC payments and it is going to be a really exciting year in 2012.

Merchants can find out more about PayWave by reaching out to their local acquirers and those folks can provide related product details. Again we are just really excited to be a part of this moving forward.