PayFair takes on the card giants

That first small step came on 9 November when,
under the banner ‘One card for one Europe’, the first payment using
a PayFair card was undertaken in a supermarket in the Belgian town
of Colruyt via terminal infrastructure supplied by French vendor
Atos Wordline.

“We offer a card for the whole of Europe that
benefits consumers, merchants and banks, precisely as the
authorities want to see it,” said Dominique Buysschaert, CEO of
PayFair, an independent company founded in 2007 by a group of
professionals drawn from the financial, IT and retailing
sectors.

As the next step, more Belgian stores are
anticipated to begin accepting PayFair cards before the end of
2009. In 2010, PayFair also expects to launch in Germany in
partnership with card transaction service supplier easycash. Next
on PayFair’s list are France and the Netherlands.

According to PayFair, full European coverage
could be attained fairly quickly for merchants as acceptance on
their existing card terminals compliant with the new SEPA standard
will only require a minor update. The ultimate goal is to take
PayFair global.

Creation of the PayFair service has been a
collaborative effort between a number of technology vendors
including US-based Unisys, which was responsible for systems
integration, and Australian payments software vendor Distra, which
has deployed its Universal Switch real-time card processing
solution.

Underscoring PayFair’s assertion that its
infrastructure is state of the art, Distra’s Universal Switch
enables real-time convergence and consolidation of payment types
for financial and non-financial institutions and different payment
and message types to be run across a single platform.

“The sun is setting on payment systems that
are inflexible, non-transparent and require different switches for
different payment types,” declared Distra CEO Mike Aston at the
launch of Universal Switch in September.