UnionPay’s QuickPass Mobile-Payments Service Makes Its North American Debut in Canada

By Kevin Woodward
@DTPaymentNews

UnionPay International’s QuickPass mobile-payments service made its North American debut with acceptance initiated in Canada, the company, a unit of China UnionPay, announced Tuesday.

Consumers can use their UnionPay QuickPass cards, equipped with a contactless chip, or a card loaded into a mobile wallet, at contactless payment terminals in Canada. These merchants include restaurants, hotels, retailers, supermarkets, and convenience stores, UnionPay says. For transactions of less than C$100, no signature is necessary when using a UnionPay debit card and no PIN or signature is needed with a UnionPay credit card.

QuickPass, when used in a mobile wallet on a smart phone, requires near-field communication (NFC) connectivity. It works using host card emulation, a cloud-based version of NFC, on smart phones using later versions of the Android operating system.

That Canada is the first North American market for QuickPass is not surprising to Catherine Johnston, chief executive of ACT Canada, an Ajax, Ontario-based payments associations focused on chip and mobile technologies, when considering the number of Chinese tourists visiting the nation. Of Asian tourists to Canada, visitors from China, with 50,295 trips made in May 2016, according to tourism-marketing organization Destination Canada, rank as the top group. They are the second-largest group, outside of visitors from the United Kingdom, 73,890 trips in May, and excluding U.S. visitors.

Now, Johnston says, visitors from China with UnionPay cards have more than one way to interact with Canadian merchants. “Canada is a favored destination for Chinese tourists,” Johnston tells Digital Transactions News. “When they come, they spend.”

UnionPay’s mobile move is not without some risk, though, especially with respect to usage. UnionPay makes no mention of mobile offers or coupons.

“The prospects for mobile wallets are limited unless they integrate some kind of coupons,” Aaron McPherson, an independent payments analyst, tells Digital Transactions News via email. UnionPay makes no mention of mobile offers or coupons.

“There needs to be an incentive for the consumer to change behavior,” McPherson says. “Simply enabling contactless payments is not enough. This has been proven by Apple Pay’s low adoption two years out, despite Apple’s strong brand, marketing capabilities, and fanatical user base. Without coupons, I fear China UnionPay is wasting its time.”