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Payment processor Network Merchants LLC, or NMI, on Thursday announced it is enabling tap to pay for iPhone. The move will enable merchants to accept contactless credit and debit cards, as well as Apple Pay and other digital wallets, through an iPhone and a supporting iOS app. iOS is Apple’s mobile operating system.
The move to add Tap to Pay by iPhone follows Schaumburg, Ill.-based NMI’s move earlier this year to add a tap-to-pay feature driven by Mastercard Inc.’s Cloud Commerce app for Android smart phones or tablets. It also follows adoption of the Apple Inc. technology in recent months by such rivals as Adyen, Fiserv (including Clover), Square, Stripe, and Zettle.
One advantage of offering Tap to Pay on iPhone is that encrypted card numbers are temporarily stored on the iPhone only for transactions made in store-and-forward mode, a feature that helps help protect business and consumer data, NMI says. In addition, Tap to Pay on iPhone allows merchants to accept mobile payments without being tied to traditional hardware, the company says.
NMI is enabling software developers to embed Tap to Pay on iPhone into their apps using NMI’s iOS software development kit. Alternatively, merchants can opt for an out-of-the-box solution using NMI’s Commerce Cloud iOS app. In either case, merchants using an iPhone XS or later and running the latest version of iOS can accept Tap to Phone for iPhone, NMI says.
“Adding Tap to Pay on iPhone rounds out NMI’s Tap to Pay portfolio, which already includes support for Android devices,” notes Peter Galvin, NMI’s chief growth officer, in an email to Digital Transactions News. “Together these offerings enable more merchants to accept payments without having to purchase point-of-sale hardware. For developers and fintech providers, our iOS and Android SDKs allow them to embed Tap to Pay capabilities directly into their apps, or merchants can simply download the Mastercard Cloud Commerce app, log in with their NMI credentials and immediately start accepting payments.”
For merchants, the move “means that merchants can accept secure, contactless payments using the phones or tablets they already own,” says Galvin. “This is especially beneficial for small and mobile businesses like food trucks, boutique pop-ups, and market vendors, where space and budgets are tight but expectations for modern payments are high.”
