Last week CIBC and Rogers unveiled their new NFC mobile payment solution (known as Rogers suretap), a combination of an NFC-SIM tied to your CIBC VISA or MasterCard credit card account for transactions. Both companies claimed it was the first mobile credit card transaction in Canada.
PayPal wrote to us and explained they weren’t amazed by the CIBC/Rogers announcement as they’ve been allowing users to pay with PayPal via various outlets in the country:
Last week, CIBC and Rogers announced they had completed the first mobile credit card transaction in Canada. This came as quite a surprise to everyone here at PayPal. Canadians have been able to use PayPal to pay directly from their smartphones for items like lattes at Starbucks and movie tickets at Cineplex since earlier this year. And as I’m sure you know, PayPal accounts can be linked securely to a credit card.
They got on to explain a mobile wallet is limited when compared to a digital wallet, calling NFC payments “far from the Holy Grail for mobile payments,” and directed us to this article by Darrell MacMullin, their Managing Director.
He explains why NFC does not equal mobile payments in his article titled “The iPhone 5 doesn’t have NFC–so what?”:
NFC-based mobile wallets don’t allow consumers to access their money anywhere they can access the Internet. It only allows them to pay with the phone (as long as it is a Blackberry or Android phone). With five million iPhone 5s selling in the first 72 hours of its availability, this will leave a lot of Canadians out of the equation.
NFC-based mobile wallets may also force many merchants to invest in new terminals, which is not something many Canadian retailers will want to do anytime soon. Even if their terminals accept NFC today, many of these terminals do little more than just transmit the card number and transaction size. They’re not equipped to automatically accept the complex coupons and offers that make the digital wallet so exciting – for merchants and their customers. I predict that many will wisely want to take a wait-and-see approach to see if Canadians start pulling out their phones en masse to pay before ripping out and replacing their existing technology. With limited merchant adoption, few NFC enabled handsets, and no ability to offer a true digital wallet experience – I’m not sure how many Canadians will understand the benefit of pulling out their phone instead of their plastic card at point of sale.
What do you think of PayPal’s argument of comparing NFC-based mobile wallets versus their digital wallet solution?
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I’d trust rogers and CIBC 100000x more then paypal and their “make up an excuse and fee” mentality.
Are you serious? Have you not seen the stupid fees both Rogers and CIBC always try to gouge out of their customers? This’ll be just another excuse for them to add service charges.
NO! ARE YOU SERIOUS?
I rather add any type of service charge than getting scam by PayPal. Rogers and CIBC are Canadian based companies which have many retails everywhere. What do you get if you have problem with Paypal? Almost nothing and they made their own rules. Read many forums like http://www.paypalsucks.com.
WHY SOOOOoooo SERIOUS?
No. Are you serious?
You haven’t seen a real scam until you meet Paypal. At least Rogers and CIBC have retails everywhere and they are Canadian based companies. Paypal makes its own rules and ignores Visa or Mastercard policies. Google Paypal scam to find out.
Hey, not saying that PayPal isn’t without it’s faults, but trusting Rogers and CIBC because of fee comparison is rediculous.
You can’t be serious. Rogers have the most ridiculous fee charges for anything. Plus their plans are the most expensive.
Anyone heard of cash, it is not traceable, it is yours to spend. And you don’t have to pay interest. Using a credit card or paypass actually makes you spend more.
yes but using a credit card can earn ya travel points 🙂
PayPal may very well be right, but I don’t know why you’d give them a voice.
Anyone who has ever had a problem with their services can tell you just how difficult it is to get in contact with a real person. Now when they have a gripe they’re all so very talkative.
I’d just love to see you ignore them next time.
This is pretty much like all other new technologies. Every company (or sum of companies, as an entity) comes up with its own version of a technology: Electronic payment here, Like VHS vs Betamax; cassette vs 8 track; CD vs DVD; Blue Ray vs HD DVD before. Then an actual collective entity forms and decides what to set up as a universal accepted standard. Sometimes, a technology that’s not the best solution for the masses wins: Betamax had much higher features and benefits than the winning VHS standard, that’s why studios and broadcasting companies continued using it and all the master copies were made in Betamax format. HD DVD had similar resolution to Blue Ray, and it was fully backward compatible, yet BlueRay became the accepted universal standard. Electronic payment is such solution. My view is: I will hold off investing on any such technology till all the big boys agree on a single process. There’s simply too many solutions to be sure of the future: NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, Wireless Transaction( takes advantage of the wifi connectivity), Barcode cards, and many smaller solutions.