Cuscal to connect another 15 financial institutions to Android Pay
Another 15 financial institutions will connect to Android Pay over the next few weeks - all of them using a service provided by Cuscal. The payments company was the third-party service provider for 25 of the financial institutions that connected to Android Pay at its launch last week.Cuscal has been a big winner from the introduction of Google's digital wallet into the Australian market, which has given it an opportunity to show that it has the capability to provide its banking customers with cutting edge mobile banking services.Cuscal launched a contactless mobile payments app in 2014 and has extended the service over the past two years to include a full suite of mobile banking functions, including Bpay and the ability to pay anyone, view any account and transfer between accounts.Android Pay is a standalone service but there is scope to link it to Cuscal's "issuer wallet" in future.Cuscal is not providing any data on digital wallet usage levels but the company's head of EFT, acquiring and digital Colin Sultana, said there has been solid growth in the volume of contactless mobile payments.Sultana said he expected growth to take off when public transport systems changed their payment arrangements to allow consumers to use their own accounts for payments.Sultana said loyalty programs were not embedded in Cuscal's issuer wallet and were more likely to emerge through Android Pay and similar services. "That is where you will get scale," he said.Sultana said Cuscal was working on a number of enhancements to its mobile banking service, driven by customer demand. Most of them allow greater control and monitoring of payments."Customers want to lock certain transaction types at different times. They want to monitor transactions in real time and they want more information about their spending. We will be adding alerts and limits," he said.