The soft launch last week of the Commonwealth Banks Tap & Pay support in their CommBank Android app was met with much fanfare by the wider Android community, and yesterday the Commonwealth Bank officially announced that it was available.
While we covered the high points in our post last week, we wanted to show what the Commonwealth Bank had to say on the addition, and we also took the opportunity to ask about Credit Card support – a feature which a number of people would love to see happen.
As we all know, Tap & Pay is made possible due to Host Card Emulation, which Google introduced in Android 4.4 (KitKat) which allows for the NFC chip in the phone to be used, without the requirement to host sensitive data in the Secure Element within the card.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MWE5l-6JVU
The CommBank Tap & Pay solution is powered by Mastercard, with Andrew Cartwright, SVP & Country Manager, MasterCard Australia saying that ’60 per cent of MasterCard transactions under $100′ are now made using the contactless Tap & Pay method.
Lisa Frazier, Executive General Manager Digital Channels, CommBank supplied some interesting statistics on CommBank and the amount of users:
- CommBank App is the most popular in Australia with 3.2 million unique registered users
- 2.35 million people logging on each week
- Since the app relaunched in late 2013, more than $100 billion in payments and transfers have been made
So, you can now use Tap & Pay with debit cards on devices running the CommBank App on Android 4.4 and above. But what about Credit Cards? We asked the Commonwealth bank about this and they advised they are still considering Credit Cards ‘for their future product road map in conjunction with consumer demand’. In other words: Request it often and loudly and it will happen.
The Commonwealth Bank is the first of the ‘Big 4’ banks in Australia to offer Tap & Pay, and at this stage we’ve not heard anything back from the other banks when we’ve asked. We’ll continue to ask and if we hear anything back you’ll see it here first. To learn more about Tap & Pay with the Commonwealth Bank, head over to their website.
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