Visa Expands Tap To Phone To 15 Countries

Visa announced Wednesday (Oct. 21) that the company is expanding its contactless Tap To Phone (TTP) payment systems to more than 15 markets worldwide, with plans to bring the mobile tech to the United States sometime next year.

The expansion follows a 12-month global pilot program. It also comes when the global pandemic has seen a surge in demand for touchless payment options from both consumers and sellers who want ways to pay that are safe, fast and easy to use.

“With billions of [Android] phones around the world at the ready, the opportunity that comes with lighting them up as payment acceptance devices is enormous,” said Mary Kay Bowman, global head of buyer and seller solutions at Visa.

Bowman said Tap to Phone could be “one of the most profound ways to reinvent the physical shopping experience,” noting that the number of sellers already using Visa’s TTP system had grown 200 percent over the past year.

TTP is now live in several countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, with recent launches in Belarus, Malaysia, Peru, Russia and South Africa. Also, Visa said it’s preparing to launch TTP in Brazil, Italy and the United Kingdom.

2 Billion Points Of Light

According to mobile-phone research, there are currently roughly 2 billion Android devices in use globally that could utilize TTP, and in turn, be transformed from traditional texting and web-searching devices into mobile payment-processing machines.

Visa said the technology also holds particular promise for millions of micro and small businesses, as research shows less than 10 percent of these small merchants currently accept digital payments. Other studies have shown that nearly two-thirds of small businesses and more than half of consumers would use TTP technology if it were offered to them.

Tom Graham, head of product innovation at Quest Payments Systems — one of the TTP program’s Asia-Pacific partners — said in a statement that COVID-19 “has changed the way people pay, and how many merchants are doing business. And this new solution [TTP] will facilitate the more seamless, flexible and convenient payments process that people are after.”

A Five-Year Plan

While the threat of COVID-19 has accelerated the spread and acceptance of almost every type of digital-payment technology, Visa has been working to enable payments on all mobile devices for five years — long before there was a pandemic.

In January, Bowman told PYMNTS that while TTP was reshaping retail, it also drove innovation in other industries.

“Healthcare is going through a transformation, retail is going through a transformation — all of these areas are being transformed by digitization,” Bowman told PYMNTS. “For Visa, the goal is to use our technology to open the door to different commerce experiences across all kinds of sectors with a simple, efficient and secure solution,” she added.

Touchless Uptake

The touchless-payment trend isn’t only a revolutionary eCommerce move for micro and small businesses but can alter the check-out process at large retailers, restaurants and grocery stores.

One example is how mobile payments are changing things is the rise of so-called “line-busting.”

Where once customers were corralled within velvet ropes to see a cashier, they’re now free to pay an associate for their purchases from anywhere within a store. It’s a digital change that not only improves the buying experience but also eliminates a potential COVID risk.

Visa also sees TTP as a replacement for ticket machines and kiosks in the transportation industry, making it easier for mobile or nomadic entrepreneurs to be contactlessly paid on the spot for services rendered.