In Italy, alternative payment methods to cash are still not used much. Credit/debit cards are used to some degree but not anywhere near the use at an international level. There are now, however, innovative alternatives that will surely contribute to the reduction of cash payments.
There has been a lot of success with prepaid. Italy is the first country in Europe for number of cards emitted and per volume of business generated, and there is conviction that there will be further development of mobile payment systems in contactless mode. There are increasing numbers of on-the-go payment methods available. Agos Ducato Pay, the pilot payment project for Agos Ducato (top credit company for Italian consumers in collaboration with Visa Italia) smartphones was launched on 10 March 2014. It is, in part, a move in response to the latest innovations made by MasterCard.
The pilot Agos Ducato Pay solution, which permits payments to be made by simply placing one’s smartphone next to an enabled POS for a contactless payment, will involve 1,000 clients who will be equipped at branches in Milan and Monza with micro-SD for payments, and offered proposals for other solutions for iPhones and Samsung. The technological choice made by Agos Ducato is independent from the SIM and permits maximum autonomy in respect to telephone network operators: the payment device, in fact, is located within the memory chip and not in the SIM card, therefore clients do not have to change their phone number or operator. It is an experiment, therefore, that attempts to take a parallel path to that of offers already active and in the process of being launched by Vodafone and Telecom.
A further advantage for clients: the payment operations are made entirely on phones, without having to use POS codes. With the use of smartphones equipped with the micro-SD for contactless payments, clients can easily make payments, even for small amounts, at the 100,000 pay points in Italy that have the symbol for accepting contactless payments.
“This solution – stated Dominique Pasquier, managing director of Agos Ducato – is extremely functional and in line with our market position, oriented towards ‘a world that is closer’ to clients, with a perspective of increased proximity. And proximity is the cornerstone of the Agos Ducato Pay payment system. We are proud to be the first consumer credit company in Italy that has launched a project for mobile NFC payments with these characteristics”.
“The m-payment market has high potential in our country”, declared Davide Steffanini, general manager of Visa Europe in Italy. “The prospects in Italy are equal, if not superior, to those offered by other European countries, for the elevated penetration of smartphones, which already represents half of all mobile phones in circulation, but according to operators it will reach 100% of phones present in Italy within a few years”.
From a technological point of view, the micro-SD that contains all of the functions of a credit card and the NFC antenna will be activated and used thanks to the Agos Ducato Pay paymentapplication to be installed on smartphones.
For Samsung owners, 500 micro-SD are set to be given out. While for iPhones, which do not possess a micro-SD slot, 500 special covers into which micro-SD can be inserted will be provided. The Agos Ducato project, as well as availing itself of important contributions from Visa Europe, has involved partners Oberthur Technologies (one of the global protagonists in the security technology sector) for the development of the micro-SD and the payment app, and SIA (European leader in planning, creating, and management of service technology infrastructure for payments) for the processing of mobile NFC payments and the management of interactions with the payment app. Various actors, therefore, have made their technological support available and are willing to cooperate for an efficient and secure development of an ecosystem for mobile payments. All hope that projects like this one will further reinforce the network for accepting contactless payments and the development of NFC mobile payments, thus helping the market satisfy the demand that will be generated by Expo 2015, precisely in the area that is interested in experimentation. Thus, Italy seems to have set off in the right direction in getting prepared to confront the challenges of innovation.
