Ensygnia partners with Ingenico Payment Services for their Onescan Mobile App

Ensygnia today announced that it has partnered with Ingenico Payment Services (IPS) for the secure mobile transaction platform, Onescan. Merchants can now work with Ingenico Payment Services in addition to the other 50 plus payment gateways supported by Onescan. As a leading global digital payment service provider, Ingenico Payment Services provides a seamless response to the complexity of payments, whatever the channel: online, mobile and point-of-sale. Offering innovative e-commerce, multi-channel, financial, and marketing solutions, it helps merchants to manage, collect and secure their payments, prevent fraud and increase their revenues through higher conversions. Ingenico Payment Services is part of the Ingenico Group, the global leader in seamless payment.

Onescan is the award winning, fully-PCI compliant, payments and loyalty platform for mobile devices that includes industry leading Identity (ID) and authentication processes. In the payments world, it allows consumers to typically go from browsing to buying in less than ten seconds.

Julian Wallis, Head of Sales – UK & Ireland at Ingenico Payment Services, said,

“We’re pleased to work with an innovative new partner like Onescan. The awards and recognition they have received are an indication of their excellence in enabling smooth and secure payment transactions on smart phones and we are thrilled to work with them”.

“It’s great to have partnered with Ingenico Payment Services”,

said Matt Deacon, CTO and co-founder of Ensygnia.

“We can now offer IPS as another great way to pay via Onescan, which fits well within our desire to offer our customers and their consumers as much choice as possible when it comes to enabling payments”.

Find out more about Ingenico Payment Services

Mobile payments mixed signals

If you are searching for clarity on the challenges facing mobile payments or its future prospects in 2015 and beyond, it's not easy. Numerous reports, blogs and news stories released every month paint a murky and conflicting picture. It's hard to see the wood for the trees when it comes to this particular emerging market. One week Apple Pay is King and the next it's flop. That's to be expected really, because when it comes to predicting the future, the only thing we can be sure of is: we're really not that sure. January has been no different so far - and finding a consensus can be difficult - but let's give it a go anyway.

Security is a major battleground for mobile payments. In some quarters, you will find security is highlighted as the stumbling block for mobile or contactless payments methods. This is no better demonstrated than by the £20 transactions limit imposed on most contactless payment methods. A survey just last month, by Wakefield Research in partnership with Verifone, highlighted this security restraint imposed by the banks is actually supported by their customers as well. Some 84 per cent of respondents to the survey said they would only use their smartphone for small or medium purchase such as a cup of coffee. When it comes to larger purchases, it seems the trust in mobile payments is just not there yet.

It's not all that surprising to me either, especially considering the deluge of cyber crime stories that made the headlines in recent months. And it's an area where education to consumers is vital, because security can in fact be mobile payments greatest strength, not a weakness. Encryption, tokenization, biometrics and device authentication can all be used or combined to make mobile payments arguably the most secure payment method available - let alone the most efficient and convenient.

Despite the perceived hesitancy around security, it's not hard to find consensus that mobile payments are on the rise. Finding agreement on the speed of that rise is harder. In December we cited a Juniper report that mobile commerce would scale to reach 200bn transactions annually by 2019; however another report this month suggests that by the end of this year just 5 per cent of the global base of NFC capable phones, around 30 million, will make contactless in-store payments on a monthly basis. Which seems a pretty big jump from there to 200bn transactions by 2019. But maybe not when you take this into account: The UK Card Association revealed £253million was spent in the UK through contactless payments in September 2014 - a year on year increase of 283.6 per cent.

It's hard to tell who's on the money when it comes to accurately predicting the growth of mobile payments. But even though the signals are mixed, the overall message is clear: mobile payments are on the way. The biggest challenge remains consumer education.

By Matthew Taylor
20th January 2015