Paypal is definitely the most important online payment system provider in the online world. Yet, it seems they are quite enthusiastic about the real world. And of course, the leading online payment service provider goes for the coolest method; over the contactless interface! Near Field Communications World refers to the interview with the Paypal President Scott Thompson on The Wall Street Journal.

Transactions are processed by Bling Nation, so merchants need to obtain a BlingBox to accept Paypal contactless stickers. Paypal customers must get the contactless sticker from a Bling merchant prior to making a transaction. The sticker is supposed to be attached to the back of the handset.

The big picture suggests that Paypal customers will be able to access their accounts in real merchant locations via their contactless stickers attached to their phones. According to Bling Nation, sticker is compliant with NFC, so it will be available to customers without a stick when the secure element dilemma is resolved and ordinary people have NFC enabled phones.

There are no technical details on the payment application itself, so I assume it is secure enough to hit the streets. I think the below issues are very critical and must be addressed -if not already done so:

- The authenticity check of the card and the POS terminal
- The verification of the card holder
- Interoperability with the existing POS network with contactless readers

Anyway, it’s an interesting move for the contactless world from a strong player!

Visa Europe and Akbank -one of the big fives in Turkey- announced the first MicroSD based contactless payment application in Turkey. Akbank, Visa Europe and DeviceFidelity attended the press conference.

As I already mentioned in a previous post, DeviceFidelity’s MicroSD product is a solid solution, especially for Turkey where contactless reader penetration is almost like %2 of total POS terminals -around 32.000 contactless readers are already installed. The projected target figure is %5 of total number 1.800.000 terminals. More than 2.200.000 Visa&MasterCard contactless credit cards have been issued in Turkey by 10 different banks. Contactless usage is on constant increase but not as much as anticipated.

I was unofficially informed that only Blackberry is supported for the time being, but I was unable to confirm it.

It’s a great success for Akbank to commercially launch a handset based payment application. Now I am waiting for the announcement of the availability of the application process as an Akbank customer, which will be by the end of this year!