Hong Kong-based Octopus Cards has added a new capability to its ‘Octopus App for Business’ to facilitate acceptance of cards on NFC-enabled mobile devices of merchants.
Octopus card holders and users of all other Octopus products such as Smart Octopus in Samsung Pay will now be able to ‘tap and pay’ on the smartphones that are set to act as card readers through the feature.
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The new addition follows a recent launch of Octopus App O! ePay QR code payment and together the features are estimated to support more than 34.5 million Octopus card and O! ePay users in the country.
Octopus Cards CEO Sunny Cheung said: “We are always looking to providing inclusive, secure, easy-to-use and customer-centric payment solutions with choices, benefitting different businesses and all walks of life.
“The new Octopus card acceptance feature in the Octopus App for Business will make payment handling much quicker, easier and more economical than before for these merchants, helping them to gain more business opportunities as well.
“We hope this new feature will create more value for cash-oriented merchants like the newspaper stalls.”
The company has formed an alliance with the Coalition of Hong Kong Newspaper and Magazine Merchants to initially roll out the new capability to approximately 400 newspaper stalls across the country.
Octopus said that the existing members of its app as well as other businesses and trades can also leverage the new addition.
