1- The govt insists the payments be done on their national backbone, which works on 0 markup, so companies have to find different avenues for revenue
2- The device is essentially a mobile phone with no display(newest version has a small pocket-calculator sized lcd, but most do not) and just four buttons: power, volume up, volume down, and repeat last message. It takes a SIM and has a rechargeable battery and a loud speaker.
3- This means essentially operators a renting a very specialised "dumb-phone"; one which has a simple audio output but no input (and thus access) to the actual app. They can leave this "phone" out in the public, while keeping their smartphone separate and secluded.
4- The device rent is lowered or even waived if you have a high-enough transaction volume. So for people who have a low usage, they can stick with checking their phone; for people with more frequent usage, it pays for it self.
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I see a lot of benefits for this. AFAIK, each device is keyed to the user, so stealing it not beneficial, but even if some one did, no can use it to access the app or your funds, since all it does is receive confirmation SMS.
There no training involved, and more importantly, no handover of a device anytime you to step away from a counter; anyone can take over and just listen to the confirmation message.
one benefit the article mentioned is that people would dupe the seller by showing fake screenshots of a transaction, how that was eliminated by the device; no sound message, no payment.
But the best benefit is the multi-tasking; you can use your hands and eyes to keep focused on the task at hand while using your ears to keep track of payments. Imagine a food-stall seller having to wipe their grease/sauce covered hands and fiddle with a slippery phone, anytime a customer paid, it would never work.
Ask Thailand and their QR-code based payments, TrueMoney and "Thai QR", because that's exactly how they work. Maybe scammers are less prevalent in Thailand than in India so they go by trust, even in 7-Elevens.
I'd be really surprised if 7-Eleven employees used personal or company-provided smartphones to confirm payments.
For most QR payment systems, the flow for smaller merchants is customers scanning a printed QR code (optionally with common amounts pre-populated) and the merchant receiving a notification (so no need to actually open any app to confirm payments, and the merchant app could easily assign different ringtones to different payment amounts). This is the use case in which these speakers make a lot of sense.
But for larger merchants with a POS, the clerk usually scans the customer's (dynamic) QR code and initiates the payment that way. Alternatively, an existing POS payments terminal can display a one-time and transaction-linked code that the customer scans.
For tax and reporting reasons alone, payments practically need to be bound to a given transaction/receipt number.
> For tax and reporting reasons alone, payments practically need to be bound to a given transaction/receipt number.
Cash doesn't work like that, so some countries might not require this link even for some cashless payments. Heck I receive money transfers in EU and US that don't have any numbers in them, and they're not $2.
It's just not screenshots. Initially the payment apps added moving icons/pictures to differentiate screenshots with actual payment confirmation screens. As a response, some people made specialized apps which dynamically recreated the same exact payment confirmation screen of the popular apps with moving parts, fake transaction id etc.
do you think such payment flow would work in the US / in the EU as well? I know that for example in Sweden Swish is super popular and you can pay with it in stores by scanning QR code (and then showing your phone to the merchant) - seems like such device could fit there perfectly.
It definitely could, but I really hope it doesn't. Contactless payments are both more convenient and more secure than (even dynamic) QR code payments. (Whether the device manufacturer should have a monopoly on NFC-based payments is a different question, and one under active regulatory scrutiny at that.)
