Let Your Avatar Pay

For such a rapidly developing market, Avatar Pay offers an optimal solution: it allows any and all mobile payments in the real, off-line world to be fast, simple and secure. This means no QR codes nor any proprietary technologies such as NFC. Instead, Avatar Pay acts as a visual ID, a proxy of a mobile wallet.

The payment with Avatar Pay is like any other payment, minus one step: the user’s phone, payment card or cash never needs taking out. When the customer, prior registered with Avatar Pay, approaches a cash register or self-checkout, the customer’s Avatar appears on the POS terminal’s screen. To pay, the customer selects his or her Avatar, and confirms on the terminal screen the Avatar’s identity with an Avatar-Code, or biometrics as an option. Done. Hands-free.

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The inessential act of juggling your smartphone or card in front of the POS terminal is removed from the payment process completely. This means less queues, hassle and unnecessary stress. In addition to cash-registers, Avatar Pay can be successfully used at self-service kiosks, vending machines, gas-stations or as an ID allowing access to event locations and passage through turnstiles.  The technology, at its core, promotes practicality and simplicity, for customers, merchants, service providers and banks.

For customers, just owning a smartphone is enough; from there, it’s easy. Three types of apps are available to them.
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• A stand-alone app can be downloaded on both Android and iOS platforms.
• A merchant app with integrated Avatar Pay consumer’s SDK to offer its service.
• An issuer’s mobile bank app with Avatar Pay SDK functionality.
  

For merchants and service providers the product presents similarly uncomplicated requirements. What does this involve?

• A touch-screen payment device with integrated Avatar Pay merchant SDK. As of late, new, state-of-the-art payment terminals have hit the market, though Avatar Pay can also function with a regular touch-screen tablet.
• The Electronic Cash Register (ECR) integrated directly with the terminal/tablet or via the Avatar Pay Cloud over a simple API.
  

The Avatar Pay transactions are routed for authorization using the existing merchant payment infrastructure, either directly to the issuer, acquirer or via the Avatar Pay Cloud depending on the transaction type (SEPA Direct Debit, SEPA Instant Credit Transfer or Card Transaction). Assuming Android devices are already broadly used to accept contactless card and mobile transactions and iOS devices are presumably to come next (following Apple’s acquisition of Mobeewave), this is a good opportunity to leverage both NFC and Avatar Pay acceptance options in one place.

The question of security is a priority of Avatar Pay. The product utilizes tokenization, application cryptography and strong customer authentication (SCA) to ensure utmost security at the point of transaction. Avatar Pay, while remaining simple, is also completely private: no Personal Identifiable Information (PII) is used, while payment and loyalty data is securely stored and protected.

Avatar Pay is not, unlike its name suggests, categorized as one of The Pays (Apple Pay and alike). It is not a payment method in itself, and in this lies its greatest power: its ability to enhance existing methods by providing an intuitive consumer experience - being able to pay by simply being ready to pay. Efficiently and elegantly.

For more information, please refer to www.avatar-pay.com.

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The PaymentGenes FinTech magazine & "Voices In Payments" Podcast are initiatives to positively impact the payments community, by educating and connecting the market with vertical-specific industry expertise.

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