Leading payment providers Optimal Payments, Realex and SagePay have signed up to work with Zapp to start to offer some of the world’s biggest merchants the ability to allow mobile payments. The agreement commits Zapp and these leading payment service providers to work together to roll-out Zapp to retailers in 2014. The rollout will include integration of the Zapp payment eco-system into the core payment methods offered by Realex, Optimal Payments and SagePay and joint marketing of the Zapp payment system to thousands of merchants.
This move – together with Zapp’s previous announcement of a strategic partnership with WorldPay – means that Zapp will have over 60% coverage of merchants in the UK in 2014. This will mean that thousands of retailers, both large and small, and millions of consumers can benefit from Zapp’s simple and secure mobile enabled check out process.
The announcement follows the release of research by Zapp showing that greater cooperation between financial institutions, merchant acquirers and retailers is required if consumers are to adopt mobile payments en masse.
The research showed 70% of consumers said complex up-front set-up processes were a barrier to mobile payment adoption; 70% cited the difficulties paying people who are not part of the same mobile payment scheme; and 80% said that not enough banks and retailers were able to accept payments. Today’s announcement is a step towards addressing these concerns through the creation of a universal mobile payment ecosystem, based around Zapp.
Peter Keenan, Chief Executive of Zapp, explains: “Zapp’s success will be based on providing consumers with easy, secure and convenient ways to pay for a wide range of goods and services through thousands of retailers. We look forward to working closely together with Optimal Payments, SagePay and Realex as innovators in the market to make secure and simple Zapp payments a reality for millions of consumer checkouts in 2014.”
