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I'm wondering if it is possible to create mobile app running on phone with nfc support to behave transparently like contactless payment card. User launch this app and put the phone to contactless terminal and then will be accomplished some communication between terminal and phone.

The goal is to provide payments between our users and merchants with contactless terminal. Our users are users of our application which is some sort of e-wallet. They have some credit in the wallet and we want them to spend the money for example in supermarket.

We assume that we will have agreement with merchants, but I want to know, if merchant can use contanctless terminals they have, without any HW or FW modifications. Or the terminals are hard-wired to VISA or EC/MC and accept only theirs cards?

iso8583.info support
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user2106769
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1 Answers1

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Your Merchant terminal works under their Acquirer Bank (or Payment Service Provider) Environment. It is a property of Acquirer or Bank. Ask them dirrectly about your loyalty cards acceptance, but not the merchant. In other case Merchant will take all risks and questions resolution for your cards.

The acceptance of payment cards (or local loyalty cards like in you case) by the terminal itself depends from the terminal functionality.

Usually, without additional agreements between Merchant and Acquirer, only well known payment cards are accepted by the terminal - some card brands which are in the Acquiring agreement, especially contactless cards acceptance.

For sure you may try to reuse terminal readers and other HW. It is possible in some cases. But, due to security reasons, it is prohibited by the terminal owners (Acquirers, Terminal SW developers, Terminal vendors) without additional deal.

iso8583.info support
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  • If I understand you well, it is not possible without agreement between Me and Acquirer. The data about the card go to the Acquirer infrastructure and then are proccessed? So there is no way, to use just HW of terminal to read data from card and then process them my own way? But technically it could be possible to use smartphone instead of contectless card on typical contactless terminal? – user2106769 Feb 06 '16 at 12:21
  • Please clarify - Do you want to process standard payment cards or your own solution? – iso8583.info support Feb 06 '16 at 13:34
  • I will reply from the last question: 1) Yes you can use your smartphone to send your customer's and payment request to the terminal devices. It could be NFC (lookup HCE) or even WiFi and BT interfaces. 2) If it is not standard Contactless Payment cards solution you need to deal with acquirer to support it on the terminal side. 3) Card data processing behind is the deal between your company and terminal owner. They can get approval from your service or from Payment schemes if they take the risks to process it at all. – iso8583.info support Feb 06 '16 at 13:38
  • PS. Visa Paywave, MasterCard PayPass, Amex Expresspay, and others already used smartphones for the payments thru NFC interfaces. All they are feet Contactless EMV standards with some customisations. – iso8583.info support Feb 06 '16 at 13:39