Payment processor Global Payments Inc. will sell VeriFone Systems Inc.’s PayWare Mobile service in Canada, VeriFone announced Wednesday.
PayWare Mobile, which operates on Apple Inc.’s iPhone, uses software and a magnetic stripe card reader to enable mobile-payment transactions.
Atlanta-based Global Payments is the first processor to resell PayWare Mobile in Canada, San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone says. Other distributors will be added, but a VeriFone spokesperson declined to say when.
“Quite simply, this is a way to provide another payment [service] for our current merchants and prospective customers for which a traditional point-of-sale terminal is not appropriate,” Jeff J. McGuire, Global Payments Canada vice president for product development and marketing, tells PaymentsSource. “It will open up some new areas of business for us.”
Likely merchants include those delivering in-home services, café operators and trade-show vendors, McGuire says. “We know there’s significant demand for this type of service,” he says, noting mobile merchants are underserved in Canada.
Global Payments will directly market the service to merchants, but other sales methods could be added eventually, McGuire says. He declined to disclose pricing for PayWare Mobile, saying “that’s really going to be between our sales team and our merchants.”
Canada will be the first market to get an EMV-compatible reader for use with PayWare Mobile.
The traditional PayWare Mobile card reader accommodates signature-based transactions. But Canada is migrating away from mag-stripe cards as the payments market adopts chip-and-PIN technology based on the international EMV standard (
VeriFone expects to launch a card reader that can accommodate an EMV-compliant PIN pad in the fourth quarter. “The form factor will be notably different to accommodate an EMV PIN pad, but we haven’t revealed specs yet,” the VeriFone spokesperson says.
PayWare Connect, the online payment gateway used with PayWare Mobile, already supports transactions initiated in Canada, VeriFone says.
VeriFone also is working on a French version of the PayWare Mobile software for French-speaking merchants and consumers.
PayWare Mobile became available earlier this year in the United States (
