Mobile point of sale tech push
Two banks are aggressively promoting MPOS (mobile point of sale) technology in an effort to expand the use of this payment method.
The payment service is supported by Visa and powered by SCCP Group’s Swiff mobile-payment platform, which has been designed to help merchants receive credit-card payments using mobile devices with advanced security.
Since the launch of MPOS last September, the number of merchants adopting it has been small, said Thakorn Piyaphan, managing director of Krungsri Consumer.
“We have expanded the MPOS technology for use with Android smart phones and not only iPhones and iPads, and it now can also accept debit cards as well as credit cards. We believe this expansion will help increase the number of merchants” using it, he said.
Krungsri is signing up more corporates and merchants for the service, focusing on delivery services, auto dealers and small businesses in Platinum Fashion Mall Wholesale. Moreover it will reduce the documents required for small businesses not registered as companies.
“We are hiring an outside company to sell the MPOS payment system to small businesses because this kind of customer needs to be educated on the technology. We believe MPOS transactions will be increased soon,” he said.
MPOS transactions at Krungsri currently average Bt100,000 per merchant per month.
Krungsri targets selling 15,000 MPOS accounts to merchants by the end of the year.
Kasikornbank executive vice president Chatchai Payuhanaveechai said the bank had around 10 corporate partners that planned to use MPOS. KBank launched K-Merchant on Mobile last October with the first three partners Nok Air, Muang Thai Life Assurance and Amway (Thailand).
The growth rate of spending via |this technology has been good thanks to the high number of agents of the first three partners. The bank aims to sell more than 20,000 MPOS accounts by the end of the year after acquiring more partners.
“The next stage is to focus on small businesses such as delivery services and direct sales, and we have set up a sales team to offer K-Merchant on Mobile to merchant customers. We will [offer] free MPOS to merchants that have monthly transactions of more than Bt50,000 and gift vouchers to encourage small and medium-sized enterprises to use MPOS,” Chatchai said.
Merchants normally pay Bt2,500 for MPOS, lower than electronic data capture (EDC), for which they have to pay a monthly fee of about Bt500-Bt1,000.
Transactions via K-Merchant on Mobile at present amount to less than half those through EDC.
