Merchant360 launches NFC stack for payment terminals
05 May, 2011
category: Contactless, NFC
Merchant360, a point of sale application developer specializing in NFC integration, has announced the release of its NFC Stack for Payment Terminals.
According to M360, current POS terminals that accept common contactless payment solutions, such as PayWave and PayPass, do not allow for easy and inexpensive integration of non-traditional NFC applications like Bling Nation and MoneyCell. Merchant360’s new NFC stack is designed to address this problem, enabling the integrated contactless reader to be shared between multiple applications.
Non-Scheme payment, loyalty, coupon, and ticketing or value-add solution providers have long been kept from residing on multi-application contactless terminals by lock downs and high costs, says M360. For example, MoneyCell had to pay very high fees to get its mobile tags encoded with a proprietary financial format, keeping them from distributing NFC tags as freely as they would have liked.
Other programs chose to use their own formats, but this makes it difficult for the application to coexist with payment solution terminals geared toward one particular scheme, such as PayPass. This requires the program manager or retailer to bear additional and unnecessary costs. With the NFC stack, M360 hopes to enabled retailers who own their equipment to have free choice of applications on their devices.
Global POS equipment provider Verifone is first among the company’s clients to order the new NFC Terminal stack.