Vodafone e PayPal have announced an agreement that, for the first time in Italy, allows contactless payments to be made via Android smartphone in shops, restaurants and other businesses using a PayPal account with Vodafone Pay wherever contactless Visa cards are accepted.
Vodafone Pay is a service that allows you to use your smartphone for mobile payments and allows consumers to add all Visa and MasterCard® credit cards, most prepaid cards and, starting today, also their PayPal account. Vodafone Pay is the payment section of the Vodafone Wallet application, available on Google Play and compatible with most smartphones with an Android operating system equipped with a Vodafone NFC SIM.
HOW THE NEW AGREEMENT WORKS
Thanks to this partnership with Vodafone, PayPal users can now link their PayPal account to Vodafone Pay and pay for goods and services through all the contactless Visa POS terminals present in the national territory, and in the millions of contactless POS terminals that accept Visa cards worldwide, keeping simply your smartphone near the payment terminal.
Currently, in Italy, 1 out of 4 POS has contactless technology, with a 100% increase compared to 2014 which places it among the first countries for the diffusion of contactless terminals and cards. There are over 16 million Italians who have a smartphone enabled for contactless payments, with an increase of 33% compared to 2014 (source: Mobile Payment & Commercial Observatory of the Milan Polytechnic, 2015).
For Vodafone customers, the agreement with PayPal represents the extension of the Vodafone Pay service to an even wider audience, with the possibility of adding, in addition to cards from the Visa and MasterCard® circuits, an existing PayPal account or creating one directly within the Vodafone application and pay wherever the Visa contactless logo is present.
THE MOBILE PHONE IS CONTACTLESS
To pay with Vodafone Pay, customers can make the purchase by holding their phone near the contactless POS, without having to open the application. To keep track of all payments, after each purchase, the customer receives an immediate notification with the outcome of the operation and can also access the Vodafone Pay app with the history of purchases made, expense details, place and date. It is also possible to check the payments made through the dedicated section of the PayPal site and app, which show all the in-store and online activities. During payments, the data is kept inside the NFC SIM and is never saved on the phone. This way, if you lose your smartphone, you just need to call the Vodafone customer service number to block the SIM and the Vodafone Pay service. PayPal also offers seller protection to offer even more convenient and secure payments.
Vodafone Wallet, the application launched in 2013 which, in addition to the payment function, houses the Loyalty Card and Transport sections, is currently available in Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
