Nigerian commercial bank, Access Bank has released a mobile payments application and infrastructure that allows users make payment via generated QR code, PayWithCapture.
With PayWithCapture, users can scan a QR code via phone camera at a merchants point of sale, as an alternative to paying via cards on POS terminals.
The service is in the same contactless payment cult as PayAttitude that was launched by Unified Payments, a shared payments infrastructure for Nigerian commercial banks, in May. But this seems more streamlined with payments enabled sans NFC tags and limitations brought on by complementary bank accounts with participating banks.
The service allows for multiple payment channel linkage for the typical multi-banked Nigerian. A user can register more than one card/account on the app and can navigate the payment as desired by selecting a single card/account to pay with, or spread a payment across multiple cards and also sports an offline capability via encrypted background USSD and SMS that can obviate transaction breakdown due to network downtime.
According to the bank, the application also works with the beacon technology and NFC that prompts a user to pay without contact once the user is in merchant’s location that supports PayWithCapture.
“This is a massive step forward in ambient context identification, as beacons allow for background positioning and detection,” the company says.
The company is touting a streamlined marketing drive that can leverage the PayWithCapture beacon and NFC technology such as personalized content and advertising.
PayWithCapture has launched a number of large merchants as pilot partners, including Konga, Jumia, South African Airways, Traclist, AirFrance, Arik Air, Domino’s Pizza and Easy Taxi, which before now has only accepted payments in cash.
