Cash has been the most popular payment method for centuries, but it is quite cumbersome. Decades ago, the payment possibilities were broadened with cheques and debit/credit cards, and recently a new generation of alternatives brought by FinTech companies is disrupting the industry with eWallets, contactless payment, etc. However, most of these new payment tools inevitably involve resorting to USA-based card networks (Visa and MasterCard) and electronic payment tools (PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Wallet). This represents a dramatic situation for the European financial industry, threatened to lose the revenues generated by the transactions but also the ‘emotional’ link with customers and even the whole payment process (consumers migrating to USA banks). In Europe, 130 billion non-cash transactions are performed each year and this number is growing 6.5% annually. The alternative payment methods like Blue Code are increasing its relevance and are estimated to process 20% of the total cashless transactions by 2020, taking one third of the total revenues generated, thus a total addressable market of €22 billion. Our Fintech consortium consisting of Secure Payments Technologies GmbH and Bluecode International AG, have developed BLUECODE. Our goal is to become the first European mobile payment system where users can make anonymous mobile device payments. We ensure ‘security by design’ through an innovative payment technology based on barcodes (Tokens) that keeps all the process anonymous, so no sensitive data like name, address or bank account is managed, and thus there are no possibilities of hacking of misuse.
This project has had as main goals to assess the technical feasibility of the objectives listed above, the commercial viability of our value proposition and the financial requirements of adjusting our working prototype to better serve the needs of all the stakeholders in the payment ecosystem, compulsory requirement to launch successfully BLUECODE in the market.
