(13 December 2017 – Australia) Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) will bring a new mobile payments technology to its domestic market, enabling small businesses to accept credit card payments of up to A$100 on their Samsung devices, without any other hardware.
The bank is partnering with credit card provider Mastercard, Samsung, fintechs IDEMIA and Mobeewave, to introduce the technology. Mobeewave will provide a white label product to the Bank of its SoftPOS technology and leverage IDEMIA's digital identity security solutions.
The bank has indicated that a pilot program will start early 2018, with the smartphone payments platform to be rolled out commercially by mid next year.
Speaking to Australian Financial Review, CBA’s managing director of commerce and platforms, Sam Itzcovitz, said the new platform would remove the need for merchants to use other products such as the Square Reader and Stripe.
“There is no dependence on additional devices or plug-ins. It's just a smart phone, nothing else, and it's much more exciting and user-friendly,” he said.
“The application and software will be free and then the business will just be subject to regular merchant fees.”
Although the new platform with be limited to transactions under A$100, CBA and Mastercard hope it will be extended to larger transactions, depending on improved security for smartphone transactions.
Itzcovitz added that bank would “continue to be keen to partner with emerging fintechs locally and globally.
“This has been several months in the making and we've identified part of the market being micro businesses, where we can extend acceptance capability for debit and credit cards.”
Mastercard Australasia senior vice-president of core, digital and new payment flows, Matt Barr, said, “We don't have a monopoly on great ideas and neither does CBA.
“It's why we created Start Path, so that we could cherry pick the best fintechs that we thought would shape commerce going forward … and help them accelerate by introducing them to our other customers and partners.”
“Australia will go through a huge shift in terms of online payments growth. Lots of retailers are leaning in and making better experiences for consumers,” Barr added.
“We've had the launch of Garmin Pay and Fitbit Pay and there is a pipeline of other wearable partnerships coming, so it will be an interesting consumer goods space.