Android Pay Makes Way To Cashless Vending Machines

Cantaloupe Systems, the mobile and cloud-based technology company focused on cashless vending, announced Monday (June 1) that it now supports Android Pay.

That contactless payment system, offered via Google, will be pre-installed on almost all Android handsets being offered through carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T.

Android Pay is slated to replace Google’s Softcard and Google Wallet, which according to the release requires multiple steps to use in payment. Android Pay offers a more simplified experience, said Cantaloupe – “simply unlock your phone and tap.” Seed Cashless will also continue to accept traditional credit card and debit payments across Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and options such as Apple Pay, Visa Checkout and MasterCard Contactless.

Upon Android Pay adoption, the payment platform will be accepted across vending machines running Seed Cashless, and the company noted that no hardware upgrades would be needed for the transition. The company said the new Google platform will also be “backward compatible” across vending machines so long as the Android handsets have NFC ability and can also support KitKat+. Seed Cashless was launched five years ago.

“Seed Cashless was born ready for mobile payments. We’ve always included Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology in every card reader because we predicted that the payments industry would eventually coalesce on NFC and we didn’t want our customers to get stuck with swipe-only hardware that would soon become obsolete. Cantaloupe is committed to supporting as many forms of cashless payment as possible,” said Anant Agrawal, Cantaloupe Systems’ president, in the Monday announcement.

With a nod to the fact that cashless transactions are not yet “mainstream,” Cantaloupe cited a Forrester report from last year projecting a mobile payments market of significant size – at $142 billion by 2019, up from $52 billion in 2014. Another research firm, Gartner, estimated that by 2017 mobile commerce revenue will account for 50 percent of all U.S. digital commerce. That tally today is just 22 percent.

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