Beam Links Blockchain, Retail Mobile Payments

Global tech startup Beam Wallet is ready to launch a new mobile payment solution, which will link smartphones and blockchain technology to enable faster and simpler retail payments.

“There are examples where adoption has been less slow,” said Beam Co-founder and CEO Serdar Nurmammedov, according to VentureBeat. “In China, 90 percent of consumers use WeChat as payment for offline purchases. Take a place like the UAE, where the phone penetration rate is much higher than average at 228 percent, you’ll find higher rates of mobile payment adoption. In Dubai, for example, we have seen consumers willing to pay using their mobile when incentivized to do so. Over there, merchants have managed to eliminate payment processing fees altogether on the Beam network.”

Currently the leading mobile wallet app in the UAE, Beam is ready to introduce an alternate mobile payments solution. The firm’s “network now operates in more than 400,000 stores” around the world,“with over 5,000 live stores on three continents. Beam has already processed over $250 million in payments for retailers such as Carrefour, Costa Coffee, Aldo, Tommy Hilfiger and more,” the report said.

“Credit card terminals process card transactions and work with Apple and Android Pay,” Nurmammedov said. “Beam integrates with [point-of-sale (POS)] systems natively (directly at the machine level), as well as with the credit card terminals. We also provide apps to merchants to process Beam transactions. Finally, they can also use a web browser to process Beam transactions.”

However, Beam plans to eventually remove the POS from the process entirely.

“In the long term, we want to eliminate the need for credit card terminals altogether, something Apple and Android Pay cannot do,” said Nurmammedov. “This is not in the interest of traditional acquirers, as they generate an average of $600 per credit card terminal each … by leasing out these devices to merchants. We want to eliminate this so the merchants can save on such unnecessary 20th-century equipment.”