The country’s largest bank, RBC, has now debuted its touchless transaction service.
Another bank has entered into the lucrative and yet highly competitive mobile payment environment as Interac has partnered up with the largest Canadian bank, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in order to bring contactless debit transactions to consumers through NFC technology enabled smartphones.
The service is expected to roll out for actual use by consumers “in the coming year”.
The demonstration of this service was held by RBC at a McDonald’s restaurant located in downtown Toronto, Canada. The device used was a BlackBerry smartphone which is enabled with NFC technology.
The service will allow other devices with NFC technology to be used for these mobile payments.
All that the consumer will need to do is use a smartphone that features NFC technology and wave it in front of the contactless terminal at the point of sale, which supports small purchase transactions through Interact Flash.
According to a statement by the RBC group head of personal and commercial banking, Dave Mckay, “RBC clients will be able to use their mobile devices to make debit payments when and where they wish to make them – and then to immediately check their online bank balance from those same devices.”
The Royal Bank of Canada has been promising a mobile payments service for quite some time, said Mckay, and this NFC technology based program has been developing throughout that period. The bank is hoping that these mobile debit transactions will become available to consumers within the next three to four weeks.
At the moment, its primary competition within the country is the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), which launched its own smartphone transaction service in November 2012. Instead of debit, that service allows purchases to be made through Visa and MasterCard with wireless provider, Rogers Communications Inc., compatible devices. That service is also based on NFC technology.
Last week, Rogers and CIBC broadened the list of the devices that are compatible with its mobile payments program, in order to include NFC technology based transactions through a number of different Android devices as well as those on the BB10 platform from BlackBerry.
