Bank Millennium has launched a service, which permits paying with a smartphone as with a contactless card. The service uses HCE technology and allows a virtual card to be created in the bank’s mobile app. Thanks to this customers can make payments quickly and conveniently without the need to carry cash or a plastic card.

– Contactless payments with a smartphone remain a novelty, however gaining in popularity among customers. This extremely simple and intuitive solution allows a smartphone to be used just as a plastic contactless card. Contactless payments in Poland are already supported by approx. 90% terminals. Moreover Poland is among the world leaders in terms of speed of adoption of new technologies by consumers. This leads us to believe that contactless payments with a phone will have an enthusiastic reception on part of our customers – Ricardo Campos, Director of the Electronic Banking Department in Bank Millennium commented.

Customers who create a Mobile Mastercard card in the Bank Millennium app will be able to use their phone to pay wherever Mastercard contactless payments are accepted, i.e. in any of the 6 million terminals worldwide. The phone just needs to be unblocked and brought to the terminal, the same as with a traditional contactless card. In case of transactions over PLN 50 it is necessary to key-in the PIN number in the terminal. Activation of the virtual card and use of the service are free of charge. The card shall remain valid for 4 years.

HCE (Host Card Emulation) payments require a phone with one of the most popular operating systems i.e. Android 4.4 (or later versions) with an NFC aerial and the Bank Millennium mobile app. What is important is that an internet connection is not necessary at the time of payment because 10 consecutive payment can be made offline (at the next internet connection the series of 10 payments will be reset). The service is provided in cooperation with Mastercard.

– Mastercard research shows that younger consumers find it more difficult today to make do without a phone, than without a wallet. This trend will continue and plastic cards will increasingly often be replaced with their digital smartphone-related counterparts. Such Mastercard technologies as data encryption, cloud computing-based payments or tokenisation permit making a step towards innovative payments with observance of highest standards of security. Now this, coupled with the open mind the Poles have for innovative technologies as well as an excellently developed infrastructure will result in contactless mobile payments rapidly gaining in popularity in Poland – Bartosz Ciołkowski, Country Manager Poland in Mastercard Europe said.

What makes HCE special among technologies, which permit mobile payments, is that it is independent of telecom service providers. A contract with a network operator is not required because the data needed for a transaction are not specific to the SIM card in the phone, but are stored in a cloud, which is provided by Mastercard’s tokenisation platform (MDES). Data generated for a transaction do not identify the owner of the virtual card and are linked directly with the token i.e. the number assigned to a specific device. This means that payments may be made only with the phone, to which the card was assigned, thus additionally improving security of the transaction.