Financial giants Citi and Visa have partnered with the country’s leading telecommunications company to bring to the Philippines a world’s first: a service that replaces credit card numbers with your mobile phone digits.
This is among the features of a new service that seeks to make it more convenient for people to ditch cash to pay for products and instead use plastic money and other alternative methods.
Dubbed as Charge2Phone (C2P), the new service developed with Smart Communications aims to make online shopping easier for millions of Filipinos.
The new service also turns mobile phones into virtual wallets that can be used for small transactions at coffee shops, fast-food joints, and even pharmacies.
“C2P raises the bar for mobile-enabled payments,” Smart chair Manuel V. Pangilinan said this week.
In a society still heavily reliant on physical cash, C2P seeks to change consumer behavior by facilitating a shift to safer and more efficient payment methods.
Data from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) showed 98 percent of all retail transactions in the country use notes and coins.
In neighboring Australia, 60 percent of all face-to-face transactions now use credit cards and other electronic payments technologies.
These technologies also account for about a quarter of all transactions in Singapore.
The new service wants to take advantage of the population’s wide acceptance of mobile phones to boost electronics payment usage.
Local telcos—recognized as among the world’s most innovative in launching mobile payments—have also jumped on the bandwagon as they look for other sources of revenue amid thinning margins from traditional voice and text messaging services.
C2P is available to postpaid subscribers of Smart and sister brand Sun Cellular.
Subscribers that want the service are issued separate credit lines by Citi that are linked to users’ mobile phone plans.
The service works using near-field communication (NFC) chips that are placed on the back of mobile phones.
These stickers work like credit cards that use Visa’s “paywave” technology that allows users to make payments by simply tapping these stickers on terminals instead of swiping them.
These same accounts, which are essentially credit cards, allow subscribers to use their mobile phone numbers for online transactions. Mercury Drug, McDonalds, and Rustans were among the retailers that signed up for the service.
As the market’s first Visa payWave contactless payment sticker, C2P will allow Smart and Citi customers to leave their cash at home, providing them with a faster and more convenient way to pay for their everyday purchases,” said Stuart Tomlinson, Visa Country Manager, the Philippines and Guam.
Smart Communications is the country’s largest mobile service provider. Together with Sun Cellular, it corners 55 percent of the local postpaid market.