BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec. 24
By Zeyni Jafarov – Trend:
Visa is currently working hard to increase mobile contactless payments and here the main focus is on the Visa Token Service-based projects, Kristina Dorosh, Visa's Regional Manager for the Caucasus region, told Trend.
According to Dorosh, in terms of the development of the infrastructure for receiving contactless payments in the region and especially in Azerbaijan, Visa Tap to Phone technology is promising, intended for small and medium trade and service enterprises. This technology allows an Android smartphone with an NFC module to function as a POS terminal for accepting contactless payments without additional equipment. Azerbaijani banks focusing on the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) show a very great interest in this technology.
The technology's advantage this is that it will expand the infrastructure for accepting contactless payments while significantly reducing the cost of accepting card payments for SMEs. Such commercial projects Visa Tap to Phone have already been launched with banks in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus, she noted.
The regional manager also pointed out that there is an active growth of tokenized transactions in Azerbaijan. After the joint launch of the ‘Pay with a mobile application with Visa’ campaign with the country's Central Bank and with the support of other local banks (International Bank of Azerbaijan, Kapital Bank, Bank Respublika and VTB Bank-Azerbaijan), which have already launched their own mobile wallets, turnover has grown by more than 2.5 times when paying with mobile phones. At the same time, the number of transactions has almost doubled.
“We continue our efforts to promote and popularize mobile payments through a broad marketing campaign. Gadgets with payment functionality play an important role in raising penetration rate of the tokenized transactions, which is reason to believe that the number of tokenized transactions will grow even more actively, " Dorosh said.
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