A new payment method is arriving in France and it will shake up habits.
A major change is coming. No more traditional payment boxes on which you place or insert your credit card. Something new is coming to retailers and it will significantly change habits.
In a few weeks, your butcher, your hairdresser or even your psychologist could ask you to pay in a new way: by placing your bank card (or phone or connected watch)… on their iPhone! A feature has been deployed on these smartphones, allowing professionals to collect their services directly from their mobile.
The principle is simple: the seller downloads an application created by his bank, completes a certain number of formalities to certify his status, receives validation from his banker to use the service, then can use his phone as a payment terminal. It works the same as a traditional case, with the difference that the bank card will never be inserted but simply placed on the iPhone. It will be possible to pay for purchases of any amount in this way.
But then, how will the customer be able to validate a “contactless” payment of more than €50? It’s simple: when the merchant asks him, he will put his bank card on the iPhone in question. Then, he will have to type his confidential code on the keyboard that will appear. There, the transaction will be validated. The process will be similar when a payment of less than €50 is refused without entering its code.
This operation could put off or even worry many customers. Entering your confidential code on someone else’s phone is not a trivial gesture, at least in theory. Because on the side of the banks which are experimenting with the system, we assure that everything is encrypted: impossible, neither for the merchant nor for Apple, to record any credit card code.
Currently, this new payment terminal can only be implemented for merchants with an iPhone and their professional bank account at Banque Populaire or Caisse d’Epargne. This represents 1 million people. The other banks (BNP, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, Crédit Mutuel in particular) should follow in the coming weeks/months. But there are no plans yet to develop the same technology on Android phones.