New Delhi, India – June 06, 2016: Mahindra Comviva, the global leader in providing mobility solutions, and Airtel Tanzania, one of the leading telecom provider in Tanzania, announced that they have jointly won the Global Telecom Business (GTB) Innovation Award for Airtel Money “Tap Tap” NFC payments in the “customer service” category. The awards were presented recently at the GTB Telecoms Innovation & Technology Summit 2016 at the Sheraton Park Lane in London.
Mahindra Comviva, along with Airtel, received the award for their joint innovation in the field of Mobile NFC merchant payments. Airtel Money “Tap Tap” NFC Payments, powered by Mahindra Comviva’s mobiquity® Money and Nearex Technologies Xip solution, facilitates fast and seamless payments at merchant POS and also addresses key customer and merchant related adoption challenges. Airtel Money “Tap Tap” NFC Payments is the first-of-its-kind closed-loop NFC payments service that brings a paradigm shift in mobile money-based merchant payments, which so far, were only performed using USSD and SMS. By transitioning everyday merchant payments to digital medium, Airtel Money is helping Tanzania move to a cashless economy.
Commenting on the achievement, Aijaz Khan, Director Airtel Money at Airtel Tanzania, said “Tap Tap is the next stage in the evolution of merchant payments in Tanzania. We have merged NFC technology with Airtel Money platform to ensure that the customers in Tanzania have a fast and seamless payments experience at merchants that are comparable to the developed world. With the ease and convenience of “tap and pay” payments delivered, we’ve enabled the right kind of ecosystem to onboard merchants like supermarkets, retail shops, bars, pharmacies, fuel stations to adopt the digital medium of payment. This is a revolution in the making because everyday merchant payments are much bigger than P2P payments and digitization brings all of them under the cashless umbrella.”