NEW YORK – On the opening day of the 100th annual NRF Convention and Expo, payments pioneer VeriFone quietly unveiled a pair of technologies that it will market to retailers in the coming months, technologies that will help those retailers use mobile payments to reshape the customer experience.
In a private demonstration given on Sunday evening, the company unveiled two solutions, an NFC-based tap-and-pay solution that lets shoppers pay for goods with their cell phones, and PAYware, which turns an ordinary iPod Touch into a secure, mobile POS terminal.
“This is what retailers are driving toward, this is where technology is headed, so we're attacking the mobility story from both sides,” said Erik Vlugt, vice president of product marketing, integrated systems for VeriFone. “We have a demo on the acceptance side, where someone comes in with their own cell phone and wants to pay with a mobile wallet, as well as where the retailer wants to be a little bit more mobile - they want to not necessarily have 12 cash registers in the front of the store, but they want to be able to take payment for a TV you bought in the back of the store and not send you with your $2,000 purchase to the front of the store to pay for it.”
There are a lot of companies jockeying for position in the mobile payments race, but Vlugt said that what makes VeriFone's solutions unique is the end-to-end security. With the PAYware mobile POS unit, for instance, the PIN is entered and the transaction encrypted on the VeriFone hardware unit, not on the Apple device, and it stays encrypted until it reaches its destination.
“You do not want to be entering a PIN on an iPod that could be hacked,” he said.
