Page 51 - Pay Magazine s2014

volume 7 • fall 2014
Now is an extremely exciting time for payments in Canada. There’s huge opportunity as more retail- ers move to NFC terminals and tap-and-pay
technology. More than 40 percent of Canadians are ready for the jump to contactless payments, and mobile handsets with NFC technology are increasingly com- mon. Now is really the time to shine.
We’ve been spending a lot of time on bringing contact- less tap-and-pay technologies to our prepaid customers through Host Card Emulation (HCE), enabling card numbers and other physical identifiers to flow easily through the cloud. HCE removes many technical and security barriers that obstructed the push toward
adding cards into contactless wallets. While HCE will finally bring prepaid into mobile wallets, it’s now up to retailers to upgrade their systems to NFC-capable terminals. This will take another year or so.
Pairing mobile payments and loyalty is emerging as a recipe for success. Companies like Starbucks, PayPal,
Google and Apple all are moving toward mobile as the holy grail of payments and loyalty retention.
—Diana Fletcher, President, DCR Strategies Inc./TruCash
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