Commonwealth Bank has rolled out software to allow all Android users to use their phones to make contactless mobile payments, becoming the the first big Australian bank to do so, according to Fairfax.
Tap & Pay for Android will be integrated into the CommBank app for Android, enabled through NFC technology, allowing users to make MasterCard or PayPass purchases up to $100 by tapping their phone to the terminal.
“We have seen an almost double of the base of the customers using the CommBank app and more than a doubling of the transactions,” Lisa Frazier, executive general manager of digital channels at CBA, told Fairfax.
“There has been 142% increase in transactions, which translates to 4.7 million transactions a week through mobile banking – these are quite big, big numbers.”
“Customers now ask us for it – ‘why can’t I use my mobile phone to pay’,” she said.
Australians are still waiting on an announcement by Apple as to when its mobile payment feature, Apple Pay, will became available in Australia.
Kirsten Robb is a former journalist at SmartCompany. Previously, she worked at News Corp as a property reporter for Leader Newspapers and the Herald Sun, and holds a Masters of Journalism at Melbourne University.
