Cellfie, a mobile payment solution provider from Ant & Bee Corporation, today announced the launch of its SoftPOS merchant payment acceptance solution in South Korea, following a partnership with KEB Hana Card (Hana Card). Cellfie teamed up with Hana Card to launch SoftPOS, a technology which turns off-the-shelf Android smartphones into a POS device allowing merchants to accept contactless Visa or Mastercard payments without additional hardware. This will allow customers to make payments by tapping their credit or debit card to the merchants’ smartphones.
Cellfie allows merchants to accept contactless payments using NFC enabled credit or debit cards, or mobile wallets such as Samsung Pay. With Cellfie, Android phones only require a WIFI connection or mobile data to process electronic payments. Cardholders are then able to tap their Visa or Mastercard on the merchant’s smartphone to make a payment. Transactions with Cellfie are protected using the same security and encryption technology offered with EMV chip cards throughout the world, and they use the same switching process as traditional POS transactions.
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“We are very excited to be working with Hana Card to bring Cellfie to the Korean market,” said Julian Lee, CEO and co-founder of Cellfie, “Korea has one of the most competitive and tech-savvy markets in the world and we are thrilled to provide the software for the most innovative payment solution in the market.”
One major benefit of Cellfie SoftPOS is the ease of upgrades, which is very limited, or not even possible with any other dedicated hardware payments terminal. Major upgrades or add-on features can be installed over the air without onsite service or device replacements. Cellfie is also a flexible and quickly scalable solution for large and medium-sized enterprises that need to enable multiple POS terminals or have irregular card acceptance needs.
“We value Cellfie’s partnership with Visa’s Tap to Phone program and we’re proud to continue our work together as the company expands its reach,” said Neil Mumm, Head of Merchant Sales & Acquiring, Asia Pacific, Visa. “South Korea has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, so the potential for phones to be used as point of sale terminals is huge. Cellfie’s Tap to Phone solution will make it easier for businesses of any size to accept card payments, using a device they already have today.”
Cellfie SoftPOS is well suited for markets like Korea, one of the world’s most digitally-connected markets. With high smartphone proliferation, Korean consumers have been migrating away from cash to digital payments for several years. Turning smartphones into payment terminals has benefits for businesses of all sizes, from helping small and micro businesses get digital with the ability to start accepting electronic payments quickly and securely, to larger merchants being able to expand their digital acceptance network across new services or locations without requiring separate POS infrastructure.
“We are thrilled to launch the first Tap to Phone program in Korea with the Cellfie and Visa teams” said Hyunkwan Kim, Chief Manager, Hana Card, “As a market leader in the Korean card industry, we are always looking to offer the best in payments technology innovations and provide the best user experience to our customers.”
Cellfie is available as a white label SDK which can be easily integrated into third party applications. Additionally, business partners have access to integration and certification support, allowing for quick and effective deployments of SoftPOS solutions.
