Total System Services Inc. of Columbus, Ga., has entered into a partnership that will allow it to begin providing secure mobile payment, loyalty and commerce functionality to companies involved in facilitating mobile transactions, regardless of form factor.
TSYS will be working with Cassis International, a Singapore trusted service manager for financial institutions, retailers, transit operators and mobile service providers.
"Everyone is looking [at mobile payments] and looking at the projections and all the other things that are coming together in the marketplace, and we want to be able to enable our clients to participate in that," Joe Majestic, TSYS director of corporate strategy and planning, said in an interview.
Cassis executives were unavailable to comment on the TSYS deal, which the companies announced Monday.
Cassis' role, among others, in mobile payments is to secure the phone environment.
"There are not that many trusted service managers in the world that are actually certified to perform these activities from a Visa or MasterCard perspective," Majestic said.
The Cassis partnership is TSYS' first foray into mobile payments, and "we'll do partnerships in other areas of mobile payments since it will be a big space " Majestic said. "This is certainly a good start."
TSYS has explored mobile commerce "for some time," Paul Todd, TSYS' executive vice president of mergers, acquisitions and strategy, said in an interview.
It remains unclear which direction mobile payments will head, but TSYS is attempting "to make sure we're being a [service] provider for our clients and we want to be flexible in making sure that we're offering what our clients need," he said.
TSYS is not concerned about which mobile payment form factor will prevail, Majestic said.
"Our philosophy has been to be agnostic to those" services, he said. "Our goal has been to facilitate [services] for our clients, so we're agnostic to stickers, microSD cards or the [near-field communication] chip in the phone."
Indeed, industry observers are split on which of these contactless methods will thrive. Most say NFC has the best potential because the technology can be used for purposes other than payments, such as exchanges of coupons and rewards points and for movie trailer downloads. Instead, they view stickers that attach to phones, microSD cards and bar codes as a bridge to NFC payments.
