Worldline Offers Tap to Pay For Merchants in France

Worldline says its large merchant clients in France can now offer Apple’s tap-to-pay.

The payments firm announced Tuesday (Nov. 14) that merchants can use the iPhone-based payment method to collect payments via contactless credit and debit cards, Apple Pay and other digital wallets.

“We are very proud to have enabled Tap to Pay on iPhone for our merchants across multiple countries,” Marc-Henri Desportes, Worldline’s deputy CEO, said in a news release.

“Having launched in Australia and the Netherlands earlier this year, we are now set to open a whole new chapter in the end-user journey at our large customers in France by giving them a flexible and secure way to accept payments with nothing more than an iPhone and Worldline Tap on Mobile iOS app.”

The launch comes at a time when tap-to-pay is ready for a broader embrace, as Jean-Marc Thienpont, head of omnichannel and biometric solutions at J.P. Morgan Payments, and Stefan Jensen, vice president treasurer at Sephora North America, told PYMNTS’ CEO Karen Webster in an interview last month.

“Generally speaking, tap-to-pay brings incremental revenues to merchants and speeds consumer checkout — but the payment option is more than that,” that report said.

It allows for a variety of omnichannel journeys, said Thienpoint, where there’s been a significant blurring in the lines between online and offline channels.

With tap-to-pay, said Thienpont, “all of the features of the point of sale are available on the phone, and there are advanced journeys that can start with buying online and picking up in store.”

Consumers can be recognized through their devices as soon as they enter a store.They can also have their loyalty points applied immediately upon transacting. Or, if they want a product delivered that’s not in stock, they can have that item shipped to their doorstep after paying for it in the store — and specifically, in the aisle.

“Tap-to-pay is a fantastic compliment to the current solutions that we can propose for omnichannel,” Thienpont said.

It’s part of a larger shift towards contactless payments that also includes the use of biometrics.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that of the almost 60% of consumers surveyed who had conducted online purchases in the previous 30 days, 51% used biometrics.

“Drilling down into the data further reveals that facial recognition and fingerprint scans emerged as the most popular biometric methods, with about 28% and 49% of consumers using them, respectively,” PYMNTS wrote in September. “In addition, 58% of facial recognition users use the method more than once weekly.”