Marco Ma (麻少華), country manager of Visa Taiwan

Taipei, July 3 (CNA) Global payments service provider Visa Inc. is planning to introduce a new mobile payment system through quick response codes, or QR codes, in Taiwan by the end of 2018 at the earliest, the company announced Monday.

The company is hoping to capitalize on the growing promotion of mobile payment platforms in Taiwan after Apple Pay was launched in Taiwan in late March and Samsung Pay and Android Pay entered the market in early May and early June, respectively.

Visa said there are now 35 million credit cards issued by 20 banks in Taiwan that can be used in conjunction with the three international payment systems, but many card holders have not signed up for those services, leaving an opening for Visa, the company said.

The three existing mobile payment platforms have been limited by smartphone brands, the operating systems used by smartphones or even smartphone models, Visa said, and it believed the introduction of the QR code payment will break through those limitations.

The new payment method is expected to make transactions easier to process and faster for consumers, it said.

Visa is releasing global standardized QR code specifications to cover all major payment networks through EMVCo., a company it owns in partnership with other international payment providers.

According to Visa, QR codes can be used in a wide spectrum of payment environments, including face-to-face (F2F), non-F2F, and online to offline (O2O), and they are also cost-effective because they do not need expensive hardware or infrastructure to complete transactions.

With this QR code platform, Taiwan is expected to speed up the pace of mobile payments and become more aligned with updated global standards, the company said.

"We support global payment security standards, such as QR code standardization and Visa Token Service, to ensure global interoperability, as well as to keep Taiwan abreast of the world's latest payment development, without compromising on security," Marco Ma (麻少華), country manager of Visa Taiwan, said in a statement.

The Visa Token Service, a new security technology developed by Visa, replaces sensitive account information, such as the 16-digit primary account number, with a unique digital identifier called a token.

The process allows payments to be processed without exposing actual account details, Visa said.

Meanwhile, Visa cited a survey as saying that 77 percent of 1,000 respondents in Taiwan who used non-cash payment services in the past favored QR code as a payment platform over the 71 percent who said they preferred the Near Field Communication (NFC) function.

According to the survey, more than 40 percent of respondents aged 20-49 said they had already used mobile payments, and Taiwanese consumers are receptive to a wide range of payment tools such as smartphones (68 percent), watches (32 percent), ID badges (16 percent) and keychains (15 percent).

(By Tsai Yi-chu and Frances Huang)
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