Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 9
By Huseyn Veliyev - Trend:
Contactless payments using mobile phones will be launched in Azerbaijan in the first half of this year, Jahangir Mammadov, head of the business development department at Azerbaijani processing center AzeriCard, told Trend Jan. 9.
He said the international payment systems, MasterCard and Visa, have already given their consent for the application of these technologies in the country.
"The work on this has already begun in Azerbaijan, and we plan to launch this service much earlier than announced," he noted. "Technologically, a user's card will be digitized in a mobile application. That is, card holders will no longer need to carry out transactions using physical cards. For this, all they need is just to use a mobile phone."
As for the use of mobile contactless payments in public transport, Mammadov said the card readers installed in buses don’t accept bank cards.
"However, if in the future, MasterCard, Visa and other payment cards are accepted there, then, of course, it will also be possible to make payments using mobile phones," Mammadov noted.
The situation with contactless payments in Azerbaijan is much better than in many countries and the overwhelming majority of POS terminals installed in the country support the contactless payments, he said.
"This means the customers of foreign banks coming to Azerbaijan and using SamsungPay and AndroidPay can pay via POS terminals," he noted.
Speaking of contactless NFC payments and tokenization, Mammadov said that first of all this involves devices running the Android operating system.
"In order for ApplePay to work in the country, Apple's permission is required," he noted. "Neither MasterCard, Visa, nor other payment systems can affect this process. Launch of ApplePay in Azerbaijan is a matter of time and we cannot exclude that by the time we launch SamsungPay and AndroidPay, we may get permission from Apple, and then we will start implementing ApplePay as well."
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