Rogers announced today that its suretap wallet will be available to customers in the coming weeks, making it the first mobile wallet from a carrier in Canada. The service will be available on select NFC-enabled smartphones, offering a co-branded virtual Rogers Prepaid MasterCard and gift cards from select national retailers as the first cards available for download.
To make this happen, Rogers has partnered with a number of companies, including MasterCard Canada through a multi-year strategic agreement to “support innovation and drive adoption of mobile payments technology across the country.”
The suretap wallet will deliver a secure mobile payment experience, safely storing payment card information and passcodes on the secure SIM card in select Android and BlackBerry smartphones. Customers will have access to additional features within the suretap wallet such as gifting of gift cards, reloading of prepaid cards, along with the ability to check account balances, view recent transactions and use location services to find contactless payment terminals nearby. And that’s not all, in the near future additional cards will become available for download including payment cards from multiple banks and payment networks and loyalty cards.
Last year, Rogers facilitated the first point-of-sale mobile credit card transaction in Canada with CIBC, using the secure SIM card inside an NFC-enabled smartphone. Since then, Canadian’s attitudes towards mobile payments have evolved. According to new Rogers commissioned research from Harris Decima, approximately one third of Canadian smartphone owners have made a mobile payment in the past year and the majority believe mobile payments will save them time in their day.