With a slew of payment solutions providers now entering the mobile payments arms race, Moneris Solutions Corp. has now bumped up its list of payment options. It’s now allowing small business owners to take Interac debit and credit payments through their mobile devices.
Last week, the payments processing company announced it was launching Moneris Payd Pro, a point-of-sales (POS) solution that can run on a smartphone. It’s touting the product as a series of firsts – Canada’s first mobile (POS) solution to accept Interac debit and credit, as well as the first to include EMV chip and PIN and contactless payment technology. Using the solution, merchants will be able to accept Interac Debit, Discover, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.
The product comes in the form of a PIN pad, which connects to Moneris’ Payd app using a Bluetooth connection. Payd Pro also requires a data connection.
For Moneris, the idea behind Payd Pro was to help small businesses accept payments anytime, anywhere. For example, customers at a farmers’ market might find it really handy to be able to pay with cards and not have to carry cash, while a contractor doing repairs might want to be able to bill his customers on the spot.
“A large percentage of transactions are still conducted over Interac. Interac is a well-trusted brand in Canada, and a lot of consumers use it,” said Amer Matar, Moneris’ CTO. “So for us, it was important that we extend the payment capabilities for more debit acceptance, and to do it in a secure fashion … That was the whole push behind Payd Pro, to allow our consumers and our customers, who are merchants, to accept secure, end-to-end encrypted chip and Pin transactions.”
While a fair number of payment processors have given merchants dongles to plug into their smartphones for their mobile POS solutions, Matar added Moneris wanted to ensure its product would always be compatible with new mobile devices. For example, there are more pins in the dock connector of the iPhone 5 compared to the iPhone 4S, meaning Moneris would have had to build two different versions of the Payd Pro solution to accommodate both. In the end, it made the most sense to skip the dongle and use a form factor that works with more devices, he said.
To get Payd Pro, merchants can apply online here and download the Payd app. Once they’re approved, Moneris will ship the PIN pad device to them, and they’ll be ready to go. There are no set-up fees, fixed term contracts, minimum processing limits or transaction volume limits.
Right now, Payd Pro only works with iOS, though there are plans to release an Android-friendly version sometime this fall.