Mobile Payment Technology

What are mobile payments?

Mobile payments (which encompass mobile wallets and mobile money transfers) are regulated transactions that take place through your mobile device. That is, instead of paying for stuff with cash, cheques, or physical credit cards, mobile payment technology allows you to do so digitally. Mobile payments can be used in a “peer to peer” context or for paying at a brick-and-mortar business. In a peer-to-peer mobile payment, you could be making an e-transfer via your bank to, say, pay a friend back for dinner or someone on Craigslist for a piece of furniture. In a mobile payment at a brick-and-mortar business, you’re using an app on your mobile device-instead of cash or a card-to pay for specific goods or services at the checkout counter. In this instance, the business would need a specific type of point-of-sale device (which we get into below) to process the transaction.

How do mobile payments work?

To pay with your mobile device at a store’s checkout counter, hold your device close to the NFC-enabled payments terminal. The reader should be within 2 inches of the source (mobile phone) to set the transaction in motion. Since there’s no physical contact between your device and the payments reader, mobile wallet payments are often referred to as contactless payments.

What’s happening in a mobile wallet transaction is that your device and the NFC-enabled point of sale are essentially talking to each other. Using that specific radio frequency we talked about, they pass encrypted information back and forth to process the payment. This all takes just seconds. Speed, in fact, is one of the coolest parts of NFC payments. They take a fraction of the time of magstripe and chip card transactions-and are leagues faster than cash.

Contact us to Design a Mobile Payments Solution for your business.