NCR Counterpoint and Apple Pay
The announcement of Apple Pay last week is the culmination of years of work on the part of Apple, Visa, and other integration parties. While the NCR Counterpoint team was aware of the announcement before it happened, details of the technology behind Apple Pay were scarce. Due to this fact, the role of NCR Counterpoint, NCR Secure Pay, NCR Retail Online, and NCR CPMobile in a merchant’s Apple Pay acceptance strategy was initially unclear.
Fortunately, NCR has been able to work with our vendors and partners to come up with a strategy to support not just Apple Pay, but also competing Mobile Payments solutions like Google Wallet.
In order to support these new features, NCR Counterpoint Mobile, or NCR Retail Online merchants are going to require a few changes to hardware and software:
Contactless Payment Hardware: An Ingenico iSC250 with Contactless Payment (Near-field Communication or NFC) support will be required.
The PCI 3.0 versions that NCR sells today has them included as an add-on module, and the PCI 4.0 versions that NCR will sell with support for NCR Secure Pay P2PE will have those receivers embedded in the unit already. NCR’s preliminary testing with Google Wallet on a Google Nexus 5 phone and a PCI 4.0 Ingenico test unit with the latest RBA version, NCR found that one needs to simply tap the phone against the Ingenico iSC250 after selecting a card from Google Wallet.
From a consumer standpoint, it was pretty easy, and NCR expects Apple Pay to be at least as simple, if not simpler. NCR has already ordered new iPhone 6 units and will test with those when the service is available next month.
While NCR is still investigating some technicalities ,their primary focus is in ensuring that NCR Counterpoint Mobile works foundationally on an iPhone 6 and 6+.
NCR Retail Online also presents an interesting case as it may not need any development at all for Apple Pay support. After all, the single use credit card tokens are formatted like credit card numbers, and a shopper may just enter what they got on their phone from the Apple Pay app. Another possibility may be offering payment options for it in the NCR Retail Online payment screen UI.
CCS will keep you updated as we know more.
– John