Samsung Electronics Canada is launching its point-of-sale (POS) technology, making it available exclusively in Canada.
The Samsung POS app will allow users to make credit and debit transactions by tapping cards or digital wallets, like Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, or Google Pay, onto Samsung near-field communication (NFC) enabled devices, without the need for additional hardware.
“There is a strong appetite in the Canadian and global market to advance mobile payment solutions.”
The solution was developed in partnership with Mobeewave, a Montréal-based contactless payments startup, which this year received funding from Samsung Venture Investment Corp. The payment solution has been piloted in Canada for the past several months and reportedly had more than 10,000 downloads.
Samsung has been gradually moving into the payments market, initially launching Samsung Pay, its mobile payment and digital wallet service, in 2015. Having grown popular in its home base of South Korea, Samsung has also added features like Samsung Pay Cash and money transfers. The launch of Samsung POS in Canada points to the South Korean tech giant setting its sights on mobile POS, a market that has been of interest to many Canadian players as well.
Over the last few years e-commerce-focused Shopify has been delving deeper into the brick-and-mortar retail space, redesigning its POS system a few years ago, with many updates since. Montreal-based Lightspeed POS, which went public this year on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and Toronto-based Touchbistro are also competing for the reigns of the mobile POS market, not to mention San Francisco-born payment solution provider Square.
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“There is a strong appetite in the Canadian and global market to advance mobile payment solutions for small business owners and entrepreneurs,” said Steven Cull, director of mobile product management and strategy at Samsung Electronics Canada. “With Samsung POS, vendors can receive payment on the spot, without requiring additional hardware. It’s an accessible, highly secure, low-cost, and easy-to-use mobile payment acceptance solution.”
Samsung is directing is new solution at micro-merchants and small businesses, looking to address what Mobeewave co-founder Maxime de Nanclas called a brand new market segment.
“There are an estimated 25 million micro-merchants and approximately 5.5 million small merchants worldwide, many of whom are unable to grow their business due to a lack of easily accessible and affordable payment acceptance services,” said de Nanclas. “We aim to drive incremental revenue for these businesses through our secure solution.”
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Mobeewave was founded in 2011 by Benjamin du Haÿs and de Nanclas with the goal of creating a solution giving businesses of all sizes easier access to digital payments. The two founders found that the digitization of payments and the adoption of smartphones created the demand for a technology platform that could turn any phone into a payment terminal. The company raised a $6.5 million Series A in 2015 and a $22 million Series B in November.
In February 2018, Mobeewave signed an agreement with Samsung Electronics to make its platform available for commercial use on all Samsung devices. The startup has also previously partnered to create a POS solution with National Bank, which it launched in July 2018. The solution created with Samsung is expected to expand to other markets starting in 2020.
Image courtesy Samsung