Tim Hortons Launches NFC Payments Service
The Tim Hortons coffee chain has rolled out Quickpay, an NFC mobile payments service using Host Card Emulation, at 4,300 locations in the United States and Canada. Customers link their existing prepaid Tim Card to their TimmyMe mobile app to use Quickpay, which enables them to use NFC to tap and pay at standard contactless terminals, irrespective of their network operator; First Data stores their card balance. Quickpay currently is available to BlackBerry 10 smartphone owners and will be extended to Android 4.4 KitKat phones in January. “We chose NFC because of the speed and convenience along with leveraging our existing infrastructure to deploy this mobile payment application,” the company says. “This gave us complete control over the deployment of the system and further opportunity to grow our best-in-class customer experience.” Tim Hortons also launched a bar code payment pilot project in Canada’s Niagara region, which also covers select U.S. Tim Hortons Cafe & Bake Shop restaurants in Maine, Michigan, New York, and Ohio. The bar code technology offers a scan-to-pay option once a Tim Card has been registered on the TimmyMe app, and it supports Apple devices running iOS 6.0 or later and Android devices running version 4.0 or later.
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NFC World (12/13/13) Boden, Rian