“There’s a lot of room for development in Romania, especially outside Bucharest in transportation and governmental projects,” Onur Altinbas, general manager Turkey, South-Eastern Europe and Russia at VeriFone, told ZF.
The purpose of the company is to take electronic payment systems outside Bucharest and try to promote such solutions among clients in the rest of the country, because that is where it sees growth potential, he added.
About 130,000 POS-es were installed in Romania at the end of last year, most of which in shopping centers in Bucharest and the major cities of the country. The number of point-of-sale registered in the country is about 400,000.
VeriFone has a 20 million point-of-sale network installed in over 150 countries.
The entire region is developing in full gear, hence the potential for growth on these markets, especially for the new contactless payment technologies using NFC (near-field communication).
“We implement the new contactless and NFC payment types here at the VeriFone center in Turkey and then in the region,” Altinbas said. VeriFone Turkey is one of the four regional centers of the US company in the world.
VeriFone products and services are available via the local subsidiary of Greek Printec group in Romania.
Penetration of contactless payment technologies, which allow users to pay by card without inserting it in a POS and typing their PIN number, is still low in Romania, with about 5,500 such devices installed at the moment.
There need to be more contactless cards available to be able to use them in contactless terminals, the VeriFone official says. The six banks issuing such cards in Romania, ING, BRD, BCR, Credit Europe, Banca Transilvania and Raiffeisen have reached a 500,000 contactless card portfolio.
More than 70% of the VeriFone products are contactless products, and the company will entirely switch to contactless terminals in 2015.
The new technologies integrated in electronic payment systems (contactless and NFC) are seeing competition from alternative solutions such as payment services introduced by telecom operators. VeriFone says they are only a threat to those companies concentrating solely on hardware, because the focus is now on software solutions and related services.
VeriFone gets 60% of its revenue from sale of hardware and 40% from security software solutions, a percentage that continues to increase, said Bulent Ozayaz, VeriFone president for Southern Europe, Russia, Middle East and Africa.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)