Published on the 21/08/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Electronic payments processor Paymark has announced that it will be launching online EFTPOS early next year…
The move means that anyone with a New Zealand bank account will be able to make online payments without the need for a credit or debit card. In fact, Paymark CEO Mark Rush said, users do not even need a physical EFTPOS card to take advantage of the new online EFTPOS functionality.
The scheme, which will be launched as a pilot in November, is being developed with three of New Zealand’s largest banks – ASB, BNZ and TSB – and is designed to give users greater payment choice; reduce the online shopping cart abandonment rate because of cumbersome processes; and circumvent merchant surcharges for online purchases that use debit or credit card facilities. With the increasing penetration of smartphones this solution is particularly relevant for mobile payments as it removes the need to input screeds of card data on a small screen. Rush said that as well as being more convenient it is potentially more secure as no card or bank account details are revealed to the merchant, adding another layer of security.
ASB’s executive general manager of technology and innovation, Russell Jones said e-commerce was the fastest-growing payment category last year, as merchants move more of their business presence to the web.
“Online EFTPOS is a natural progression of a payment method first introduced in 1989 and now well embedded in Kiwi day-to-day life. “The EFTPOS online initiative we are launching with Paymark is another New Zealand first that will be great for merchants and our customers,” he said.
Once launched, purchasers will be able to choose the ‘online EFTPOS’ payment option on participating merchants’ websites. This generates a digital token, effectively a message regarding the details of the purchase, which is sent to Paymark. Paymark ensures the details reach the purchasers’ bank and auto-populates the payment fields ready for the user to log into their online banking or mobile banking app and authorise the payment. The digital token is only good for one use and has a limited life to reduce the possibility of fraud and is made more secure because all the payment processing is being done at the banking end instead of merchant-side.
The solution requires the merchant’s website to be integrated with Paymark via a standard APIs or a participating e-commerce gateway such as the gateway run by Paymark. Rush said he is already in the early stages of discussions with other e-commerce gateway companies, such as Flow2Cash, PaySolutions and BPS, regarding integration with their payment carts.
Paymark appears to be taking the opposite approach to the Poli debit solution, which launched at its first major New Zealand merchant customer, The Warehouse, in 2010. Poli is also designed for customers who do not have or wish to use a credit or debit card, but it displays users’ banking environment within the merchant’s screen.
Rush said of the new Paymark solution that “the banks like the idea of giving people access to their bank accounts and from a simplicity point of view it’s great”.
