Hypercom Corp. will provide more than 12,000 PIN pads with EMV contactless card readers to European retailer Carrefour, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based point-of-sale terminal maker announced Thursday.
The agreement significantly grows Hypercom’s existing business with Carrefour, expands the terminal maker’s regional footprint and boosts its global market share, according to the company.
Carrefour intends to deploy the readers and Hypercom’s Wynid server-based payment product at 210 of its French hypermarkets and all of its petrol stations in France. A hypermarket is combination supermarket and department store.
“This rollout in France is probably the largest EMV contactless rollout worldwide,” contends Alan Moss, Hypercom vice president of marketing and business development for southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Nick Holland, a senior analyst at Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC, agrees the deal is significant for Hypercom. “Twelve thousand readers is a sizable number to be hitting the market,” he says.
France typically has been innovative in payments, and Carrefour exists mostly in France, Holland notes. “If you have a very large merchant with terminals that can accept contactless and [Near Field Communication mobile payments], it could by the start of a big contactless mobile initiative in the country,” he says.
Indeed, Nice, France, is hosting a mobile-payments pilot this spring, Holland notes. Residents will use mobile phones embedded with NFC chips to pay for transit and some other services.
Carrefour is adding Hypercom’s EMV contactless readers because the retailer wants to “migrate all of their loyalty base to contactless” loyalty cards, says Moss. “When you look at their loyal customer base, it’s obviously running into several million. It’s a huge change,” he says.
Carrefour officials did not return requests for comment by deadline.
