As the mobile-payments ecosystem continues to take shape, Total System Services Inc., or TSYS, is dipping its toe into the pool for the first time through a partnership with a Singapore-based trusted service manager for financial institutions, retailers, transit operators and mobile-service providers.
The agreement with Cassis International will enable TSYS to begin providing secure mobile-payment, loyalty and commerce functionality to companies involved in facilitating mobile transactions, regardless of form factor, Joe Majestic, TSYS director of corporate strategy and planning, tells PaymentsSource.
“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,” he says.
Cassis is globally certified by Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide. Cassis executives were unavailable to comment on the TSYS deal, which the companies announced Feb. 7 (
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 says.
The Cassis partnership is TSYS’s first foray into mobile payments, but it will not be the last, Majestic says. “We’ll do partnerships in other areas of mobile payments since it will be a big space ” he says. “This is certainly a good start.”
TSYS has explored mobile commerce “for some time,” says Paul Todd, TSYS executive vice president of mergers, acquisitions and strategy. 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 adds
TSYS is not concerned about which mobile-payment form factor will prevail, Majestic says. “Our philosophy has been to be agnostic to those [services],” he says. “Our goal has been to facilitate [services] for our clients, so we’re agnostic to stickers, microSD cards or the [NFC] chip in the phone.”
Indeed, industry observers are split on which contactless method will thrive. Most believe 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 barcode technology as a bridge to NFC payments.
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