SIA and Orange Business Services Agree Europe Mobile POS Venture
Italy’s technology infrastructure group SIA and Orange Business Services have signed a collaboration agreement that will enable European and extra-European Union (EU) banks and merchants to manage payments via mobile point of sale (POS) terminals.
Under the agreement Orange Business Services will provide a managed machine to machine (M2M) solution with global roaming services, enabling remote terminals to automatically transmit data to the SIA technology infrastructure.
SIA said that the agreement enables the group to take a significant step forward in the creation of a single operating network at the European level which will collect payments traffic generated by wireless POS terminals and other connection channels of merchants and then deliver it securely and reliably to the authorisation systems of banks, terminal operators and other acquirers.
At present, SIA has enabled almost 5,000 mobile POS terminals and plans to reach around 60,000 terminals by the end of the year. These devices can manage transactions coming mainly from European countries – including France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland and the UK – and extra-EU countries, such as South Africa.
“Thanks to the Orange Business Services solution, from today we are able to simplify further the communications between merchants and banks by offering payments also via mobile POS terminals at continental level,” said Andrea Galeazzi, network services division director, SIA.
“This reconfirms SIA’s role as a single partner in Europe, managing the last mile of payments regardless of the type of connectivity employed and the country where the transaction is originated.”