Verifone and Swipp, a leading Danish mobile payment app, today announced an agreement to integrate Swipp as an accepted payment method for more than 30,000 Danish merchants using Verifone devices. The development of the app has been supported by more than 70 banks in Denmark.

Based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, the service will allow contactless payment from all phones with Swipp. The user experience will be very similar to that of Near Field Communication (NFC) payments – consumers will need to simply tap the phone in front of the terminal and swipe the app for approval.

The partnership will allow more than 800,000 Danes who currently use Swipp to use mobile payments to pay for their goods in store on a day to day basis – currently more than 50 per cent of all terminals in Denmark are supplied by Verifone. Consumers will also be able to benefit from Swipp’s high transfer limits, allowing them to pay up to DKK 25,000 (equivalent of EUR 3000 or USD 3,600) per day. The service will be live at a number of joint clients from December 2015.

“The Danes are very eager to be able to pay via their phones, and this is a genuine game changer in mobile payments in Denmark”, says Chief Commercial Officer Peter Bredgaard from Swipp. “Merchants will experience an easy path to mobile payment as this only requires a minor upgrade of already installed Verifone terminals. They avoid extra devices in stores and all the cost and complexity associated with new hardware. As such it is by far the most cost-effective and fastest implementation of integrated mobile payment services you can embark on as a retail company in Denmark.”

By allowing Danes to pay directly with Swipp via contactless enabled payment terminal, the partnership will significantly reduce transaction and project costs for merchants. The Swipp app relies on account-to-account payments with low transaction costs, no intermediaries and no risk of the payment not getting through to the merchant. Integration from the app directly to the Verifone terminals means no project costs, no extra devices and low barriers to adoption. The solution will be available for both the stand-alone terminals in the SME market as well as the larger retailers with ECR-integrated terminals.

“We see it as a truly future-proof approach to mobile payment where the payment terminal is the focal point in the physical store”, said June Felix, president of Verifone Europe. “Verifone opens up Bluetooth Low Energy communication as a supplement to already active EMV and NFC capabilities, and this allows the merchant to integrate new methods of payment without spending time and money on software integration with a number of different payment solutions.”