Payments round-up: 13 October 2016
Make it lean, keep them keen. A round-up of events in the payments space.
Nordea is leaving the Swipp collaboration and partnering with Danske Bank’s MobilePay platform in Denmark and Norway. The shared payment solution’s plan is a reaction to “new international players” who “regularly appear in the market”. Danske says it will begin converting MobilePay to a subsidiary with its own board of directors, and MobilePay will no longer be branded as “by Danske Bank”.
MobilePay also wants to talk with Swish in Sweden, so personal users can make payments between both systems. In Denmark, MobilePay has more than 3.2 million registered users and more than 35,000 business customers. In Norway and Finland, its registered users amount to 210,000 and 180,000, respectively.
The UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) is conducting a survey to collect evidence on how well access to payment systems (both direct and indirect) is working for payment service providers (PSPs). This will help its monitoring and reporting on access – so go to their website if you have something to say.
This year the PSR also conducted a market review of the supply of indirect access to payment systems. Some issues include small non-agency indirect PSPs (IPSPs) have limited choice of indirect access providers and IPSPs face barriers to switching.
In Canada, NetCents Technology has entered into a letter of intent with investment and advisory firm The Hillcore Group for the licensing of the NetCents’ Digital Payment Platform.
In space no one can hear you pay
The deal means the platform can be used in international markets that process an “estimated” 1.5 billion transactions per year valued in excess of $46 billion. Netcents also gets an ongoing licensing fee and a percentage of transaction revenues earned by the licensee.
Meanwhile, on the edge of space, Nationwide (based in the UK, not on the Moon) has completed the world’s highest ever contactless payment – “more than three times higher than Mount Everest and as cold as Antarctica” – i.e. 100,000 feet (30,480 metres). With the help of First Data it developed a specially designed Clover Mobile terminal to process the transaction. A programmed robotic arm and weather balloon were used for the high-level adventure.
And the point of all this? Paul Horlock, head of payments at Nationwide, says it wanted to “celebrate” this way to pay and “highlight how technology has transformed our day-to-day lives”.
