Gemalto, Worldline Combine to Give Banks, Card Issues Faster Mobile Payments Access
Banks and payment card issuers have been kind of on the back side of the whole mobile payments phenomenon, as mobile device makers and individual retailers have taken the lead.
Now, a new combined effort from Worldline and Gemalto will kick in new capability, giving banks and the like a complete system that’s easy to put in place and use.
The system Gemalto and Worldline are putting together represents a ready-to-use, yet still fully customizable, system that allows issuers to get a product in the market more quickly than many other alternatives—including in-house development—but also ensure the security of the data involved.
Since Worldline is a European market leader in payment systems, it’s set to offer a tokenization system known as the Token Service Provider platform.
That allows physical cards to operate like digital tokens, where the information isn’t kept, but instead refers to a token representation, offering a layer of security for the payment data. Gemalto, in turn, will stick to its skills in digital security, bringing the Allynis Trusted Services Hub into play.
With Allynis, Gemalto can embed the tokens Worldline makes into smartphone-based mobile wallet systems, effectively making the credit card digital and protected accordingly.
Both companies will be on hand at the Money 20/20 Europe show coming up in Copenhagen and invites media to discuss the partnership.
This is great news for banks, as it’s now that much simpler to get into the mobile payments market.
The bad news, of course, is that this is a market already stuffed to the gills with competitors, and banks will be walking into an environment that might charitably be described as “hotly contested.”
There are so many options for users today that banks will not even be able to take current customers for granted, and will have to work hard to not only draw users, but also break these users away from currently-used alternatives.
The Gemalto and Worldline combination effort should produce some excellent new propositions for banks, but those banks will need to be aggressive in their marketing efforts and rewards programs to get users interested.
With so many platforms already in place, the banks will have to prove themselves the greater value in order to succeed.