Banca Transilvania Introduces Mobile Payments

It might sound like the start of a bad and vaguely offensive joke—so this Transylvanian bank introduced mobile payments—but that’s just what happened. Banca Transilvania recently turned to Inside Secure’s Mobile Payment Server and Mobile Payment Client to bring mobile payment services to its customer base.

Inside Secure’s mobile payment services provide a ready-made way for banks to roll out mobile payment services to their customers, while not requiring the lengthy and pricey steps of actually developing a mobile payments program. With such systems, banks and other issuers can set up their own programs and best address customers’ needs.

Additionally, Banca Transilvania brought in the Inside Secure Code Protection Tool, which gives the other tools a little extra security. Since mobile payments have long been on the receiving end of skepticism over security, being able to provide that little extra dose of protection shouldn’t go without welcome.

Banca Transilvania represents the first bank so far to run its systems through the Visa Token Service Token Requestor – Token Service Providers program, which should give it even better security capability. Since Visa Token Service converts cardholder information to a token, or a unique digital identification system, the end result is less information available to be stolen in the first place.

Inside Secure’s chief operating officer, Simon Wilson, noted “We see great traction with banks who want to easily get to market with a highly-secure complete mobile payment solution and we expect to see additional banks and institutions come on board in the coming months.”

It’s clear that Banca Transilvania is taking security seriously here; perhaps they’ve seen the various studies suggesting that people like the idea of mobile payments, but find the execution clearly lacking. That’s not hard given the sheer number of data breaches we hear about these days. With a system like this, however, it’s clear that data protection is very high up on the bank’s priority chain, and that should make the migration to digital a lot easier for all concerned.

While there may be some skeptical customers out there, there should likewise be plenty of eager early adopters ready to get in. Those in turn will serve as positive word of mouth about the value of such systems, and give Banca Transilvania’s mobile payments foray a whole new life.