Paydiant to Bring Mobile Payments to Subway Restaurants

Paydiant, a mobile payments startup based in Massachusetts reports that it has been chosen by Subway, the ubiquitous purveyors of sandwiches, to be the company’s mobile payments partner.

Subway counts over 40,000 locations worldwide, and the choosing of Paydiant is a major win for the 3-year-old mobile wallet provider. Both Paydiant and Subway have stated that this is not a pilot program, but a wide-scale national rollout.

Paydiant offers a mobile payment app that can be branded by the merchant. The mobile wallet requires the customer to scan a QR code at the merchant’s POS terminal to prompt a choice of payment methods that is stored in Paydiant servers. Paydiant also has plans to launch a rewards program this month, which may promote loyalty in Subway customers.

Along with the promise of increasing sales through rewards, Subway greatly values the customer data that mobile payments offer. For a major retailer like Subway, big data is a huge incentive for the mobile payments push.

However, according to digitaltransactions.net, this partnership is not an exclusive one. Chris Gardner, co-founder of Paydiant states, “We never in a million years request exclusivity from anybody, Exclusivity doesn’t make sense.”

This deal was a long time coming, as Subway and Paydiant had been in discussions over the years. Subway was also rumored to be in talks with Isis, the carrier-backed mobile wallet, and the Merchant Customer Exchange, a retailer-backed payment system.