TD Bank today has announced the launch of TD Mobile Payment, which will allow users to make NFC mobile payments from various smartphones on Rogers, Telus and Bell. The bank says it is the first financial institution in Canada to offer a payment solution with the ‘Big 3’ (Telus previously teamed up with CIBC; Bell teamed with RBC):
“We’re proud to be the first bank in Canada to offer a mobile payment solution with Canada’s three major wireless networks, on a variety of devices,” said Rizwan Khalfan, Senior Vice President, Digital Channels, TD Bank Group.
TD Mobile Payment will be built into the TD Mobile app, which will utilize the same NFC-SIM technology used by other mobile payment solutions to make contactless payments on select Android and BlackBerry handsets (BlackBerry 9900, Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, Samsung Galaxy Note 2/3, Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One) at Visa payWave enabled terminals. TD says its mobile app is the ‘most downloaded banking app in Canada’ with over 2 million users.
A recent TD Mobile banking survey also revealed Canadians would be comfortable making an average maximum purchase of $95 using their smartphone.
Rogers recently sent us a smartphone to test out their suretap mobile wallet, which as you can see below worked fairly well at our local Starbucks (some attempts just did not work at all). One major limitation was being able to find a point-of-sale terminal to support contactless payments, but most major retail chains usually do.
Earlier this week rumours swirled Apple’s next iPhone 6 will possibly integrate NFC for mobile payments. Until iPhone hardware supports NFC, Apple users will be left out of this mobile payment trend, until the company announces its rumoured payment solution.
The earlier NFC iPhone 6 rumour claimed the company had stuck a deal with China UnionPay, which would use Gemalto’s NFC SIM solution–currently being used by Rogers suretap.
Apple currently has over 800 million iTunes accounts with the majority tied to a credit card, and it remains to be seen what the company will do should it launch its own mobile payments solution.
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So, does this mean that users on Koodo are not able to take advantage of this?
So far it seems like only the major brands have access to mobile payments.
Even if Apple did implement NFC, I would not only not configure it with any cards but I would want a switch to disable it completely to avoid being a possible vector for attack.
I prefer keeping my cards separate from my phone thank you very much. The only “card” that I have is my starbucks card but I have control over how much is loaded and I have to physically engage either the app or passbook to use it.
Even then, I still prefer to use my physical starbucks card because it has my name on it.