BizBahrain May-June 2017

Interview | NEC Payments
payment flows, and the direct integration
of virtual payments with business,
finance, or CRM applications such as
Microsoft Dynamics.
What regions/countries are the fastest
adopters of mobile payments, and why?
Interestingly, the fastest adopters
of mobile payments have been new
consumers in emerging markets, where
in some cases entire generations of
payments products and technologies
have been skipped in favour of new
and innovative mobile-based payment
methods. This early adoption has been
driven largely by the lack of legacy
investment in payments infrastructure
and technologies, and so it made
economic and practical sense to use
the most widely available distribution
channel to reach consumers and
merchants. Even in countries where
financial services are not widespread,
a large majority of the population has
access to mobile telephones, and there
is broad mobile network coverage. This
explains why early mobile payments
products like Mpesa in Kenya quite
literally boomed onto the market and
achieved huge take-up rates.
How are payments changing during
multi-channel retailing, and what role
does NEC play in impacting the shopper
experience? S-commerce (commerce
via social media) is anticipated to grow
in the future. How can payment service
providers support this growth?
One of the challenges of multichannel
retailing is ensuring that the
customer experience is consistent across
all channels, and that can be difficult
when it comes to accepting payments.
NEC Payments technologies can be
used by retailers and micro-merchants
that are operating across social media
channels to help increase the security of
the payments that they accept digitally,
and can help to reduce administration
and reconciliation workload by
consolidating payments from multiple
channels and customer interfaces into a
single payments system.
What does payments look like for
retailers in the next 10 years?
Given the pace of development that
we see currently, it is very difficult to
forecast accurately what the future
might hold; however, we expect that
the technology advancements in
retail management systems such as
cloud-based POS solutions and the
continued growth in mobile POS (MPOS)
acceptance will help to drive electronic
payments acceptance for lower value
transactions in convenience stores,
small retailers, delivery services and
transportation. At the higher-end of
the retail industry, we expect that a
move toward omni-channel retail and
payment systems will enable merchants
to gather added-value through increased
efficiency, business information,
and consolidation of payment flows;
and from the support for new social,
mobile and online sales, marketing
and distribution channels. The current
strong growth trend in e-commerce and
m-commerce amongst millennials and
new consumers is expected to increase
exponentially in line with the advent
and promotion of these new channels.
NEC Payments
technologies can be
used by retailers and
micro-merchants that are
operating across social
media channels to help
increase the security
of the payments that
they accept digitally,
and can help to reduce
administration and
reconciliation workload
by consolidating
payments from multiple
channels and customer
interfaces into a single
payments system.
Are the security standards on devices
enough to handle payments and credit
card information?
Security has to be at the front and
centre of any technological development
in the financial services and particularly
retail payments space. At NEC
Payments we have focused on the use of
tokenization technologies - the process
of replacing secure data such as card
details with non-secure data ‘tokens’ - in
order to enable secure processes to be
initiated in environments and devices
that may not be completely trusted.
These technologies also have many
applications outside of the payments
space, for example by providing ways
of managing storage of sensitive data
records - such as personal identifiable
information, medical and government
records - in highly secure centralized
data warehouses where they can be
better protected than if they were stored
in multiple other remote systems or
devices.
What do you think is next for cashless
payments?
In this region, the next critical
factor in the evolution of cashless
payments will be the wide roll-out
of contactless payment acceptance
at retail outlets and other merchant
locations. While there has been some
movement towards contactless mobile
payments, much of this has been done
using closed-loop technologies that are
not compatible, or not connected, to the
international payment schemes, and
because of this, take up has been slow.
The roll-out of contactless terminals
will be quickly followed by contactless
mobile payments apps that enable
credit, debit and prepaid cards to be
stored and transacted upon via mobile
devices. Many of these apps use the
same advanced tokenization techniques
that NEC Payments have built our
technologies on.
What's are some of the new technologies
we're going to see in the payments world
in 2017?
To give a ‘top three’ answer we would
say: growth in the number and take up
of contactless mobile payments apps;
virtual payments becoming broadly
accepted for B2B supplier payments
and for digital commerce transactions
by individuals; and the start of a
shift towards digital channels using
distributed ledger technologies such as
blockchain for remittance, electronic
Know Your Customer (eKYC), and trade
finance use cases.
36 May-June 2017