JPMorgan Chase (JPM) announced Wednesday that it has begun supplying retailers and other merchants with new payments terminals that can accept payments from smartphones and cards embedded with computer chips as well as traditional debit and credit cards.
JPMorgan Chase designed the "Future Proof" terminal in response to the anticipated growth in consumers' use of mobile phones and chip-enabled cards as payments methods. These methods are already popular in Europe and Canada and Juniper Research estimates that by 2015, $74 billion of goods and services will be purchased using these types of payments.
"As emerging payment options gain adoption in the U.S., merchants are looking to make the customer check-out process as easy and safe as possible," said Mike Duffy, president of Chase Paymentech, JPMorgan Chase's payments subsidiary. "The Future Proof terminal is a one-stop solution for merchants to keep accepting today's forms of payment and prepare for new consumer payment preferences on the horizon."
The new device is hitting the market at a time when payment networks such as MasterCard and Visa are encouraging the use of chip cards as a way to curtail fraud. Widespread use in the United Kingdom and Canada suggests that the cards can reduce card-based fraud, JPMorgan Chase said.
