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Innovation Excellence winner: Tap & Pay
02 Apr 2014
Canstar’s 2014 Innovation Excellence awards highlighted a select group of outstanding products from the banking and insurance sectors that showed true innovation in their fields. Commonwealth Bank?s Tap & Pay stood out in the online banking category.
What is the product?
A near-field communication (NFC) solution that essentially marks the next step in the introduction of the “mobile wallet” – using your mobile phone as a payment device at the checkout.
In partnership with MasterCard (and Samsung Electronics Australia for the Samsung Galaxy S4s with Tap & Pay pre-embedded), Commonwealth Bank Australia can offer its customers the opportunity to use NFC-enabled phones to pay for goods at PayPass terminals throughout Australia.
CommBank customers can pay a $2.99 fee to activate a “PayTag” (and the associated app), which is a patch that can be stuck on the exterior of smartphones (or a device already inside the Samsung Galaxy S4), and then can use the product free for the first year.
According to CommBank, Tap & Pay “marks the next step in the introduction of a mobile wallet into our customers? everyday lives, simplifying the convenience of payment from our phones and laying the foundations for future innovations”.
As the patch or embedded solution is linked to a customer?s account through a cloud-based solution, they can choose which payment account they would like to link to the device through the app.
In time, CommBank, in partnership with MasterCard, hopes to embed Tap & Pay in other smartphone models.
Standout features
• Using NFC technology either as a stick-on patch or embedded into a certain model of smartphone (currently only the Samsung Galaxy S4), consumers can use their mobile phone to make a payment instead of having to carry a physical card.
• Payments can be made at any of Australia?s 90,000 merchants with NFC terminals. (There are 220,000 PayPass contactless terminals in Australia and 1.6 million merchant locations worldwide.)
• Customers can link their preferred payment account to the PayTag, allowing flexibility and choice.
• A secure payment solution – the PayTag is backed by a 100% money-back guarantee in the case of fraud (as long as the card?s terms and conditions are followed).
• The Tap & Pay function can be turned off and on at any time by the phone user, allowing an extra level of security for the customer.
Canstar’s verdict …
This Australia-first product is an exciting step towards a future of complete convenience. The fact that Tap & Pay can be embedded into certain models of phone is unique, and it?s an element that certainly makes paying for goods at the point of sale a much simpler and faster experience.
It seems likely that this idea could grow, incorporating more phone models, which could be great for banking customers.
www.commbank.com.au/cantap | 132 221
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