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easycash (Ingenico) Completes its Contactless Portfolio with Visa payWave
Ingenico announces that its affiliate easycash GmbH has completed its contactless acquiring portfolio with the certification for Visa Europe's Visa payWave cards.
Starting immediately, easycash will accept all contactless card standards currently available in Germany. This includes MasterCard PayPass, girogo, and Visa payWave. In order to accept the new contactless cards, retailers require the corresponding acquiring contracts and a NFC‐capable terminal of the latest generation, the Ingenico iCT250. The license for Visa payWave was issued in Q1 2012.
easycash makes it possible for its customers to implement all currently available contactless card standards through one company. This provides retailers with a service from which they can also profit economically: The register throughput is sustainably increased since payments can be processed quicker and so‐called micro‐payments – single‐digit or low two‐digit Euro amounts – are increasingly paid with cards.
In order to perform a transaction with a contactless card, the card only needs to be held up to a compatible terminal device which triggers the transaction. In the future, NFC payment chips will be built into watches, key chains, or mobile phones in Germany, which will make non‐cash payments even more attractive.
In Germany, contactless is currently offered by Visa Europe (payWave), MasterCard (PayPass), and the German Sparkasse and Giroverband (girogo GeldKarte [MoneyCard]). Visa Europe states that it intends to issue around 500,000 Visa payWave cards in the country by the end of 2012. The BW Bank, comdirect, DKB, Landesbank Berlin, TARGOBANK, Volkswagen Bank, and Postbank have already indicated their cooperation starting in the middle of the year. The Deutsche Sparkasse and Giroverband (DSGV) plans to distribute around 1 million girogo GeldKarte [MoneyCards] to its customers in 2012.
At the moment there are already over 230 million contactless cards in circulation, around 100 million of which are MasterCard PayPass cards (world‐wide), 30 million payWave cards distributed by Visa Europe and 100 million by Visa Inc.
easycash (Ingenico company)