After piloting Visa Tap to Phone over the past year, the company has announced the product availability in more than 15 markets with plans to expand to the US and accelerate global product growth in the rest of the world via more than 35 new partners, including Visa Ready for Tap to Phone partners.
Visa Tap to Phone contactless payment platform goes live worldwide
The product transforms current generation Android smartphones or tablets into contactless, or tap to pay, software-based point of sale (softPOS) terminals without additional hardware.
As part of Visa’s commitment to digitally-enable 50 million small and micro businesses, this tool helps businesses quickly accept contactless payments anywhere, anytime.
Already, the number of sellers using the product has grown by 200% over the past year and is now live in numerous countries across Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America.
Recent launches for it include Belarus, Malaysia, Peru, Russia and South Africa, with upcoming launches planned in Brazil, Italy, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and more.
Opportunity by the numbers:
- 2 billion Android devices globally could transform to payment acceptance machines.
- Tap to Phone holds particular promise for the 180 million micro and small merchants (MSM) around the world, where fewer than 10% of MSMs in many emerging markets currently accept digital payments.
- In a survey conducted by Visa, 63% of MSMs said they would likely implement Tap to Phone in their own businesses and more than 50% of consumers said they would likely use it if offered to them.
“It was just five years ago when Visa set out to enable virtually any IoT or mobile device to make payments and now today, we are enabling many of those same devices to accept payments in a very simple way with Visa Tap to Phone,” says Mary Kay Bowman, global head of buyer and seller solutions, Visa.
“With billions of phones around the world at the ready, the opportunity that comes with lighting them up as payment acceptance devices is enormous. Visa Tap to Phone could be one of the most profound ways to reinvent the physical shopping experience.”
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