Mastercard partners with Ton to strengthen payment technology via cell phone

By Edlyn Cardoza

As contactless technology continues to grow in more than 90 million Mastercard card acceptance locations, Tap on Phone is being launched worldwide. Mastercard supports 131 Tap on Phone projects, 14 in the Latin American and Caribbean region, and many others under development. Locally, the partnership with Ton, Stone’s solution aimed at microentrepreneurs and the self-employed, now enables transactions with unlimited value.

“Stone was the first Brazilian company – and one of the first in the world – to launch this novelty. Now we are ready to scale the product, with all the quality and safety that our customer deserves. TapTon is also a financial education tool, possibly the first of many entrepreneurs to accept card and operate a digital account. We are contributing to the growing digitization of retail in the country,” says Augusto Lins, President of Stone.

TapTon, launched in August 2021, is a feature that can be accessed within the Ton app and enables merchants, especially small and medium-sized ones, to accept credit or debit transactions through approach cards (NFC) and digital wallets. With Tap on Phone technology, businesses of any type or size can offer new payment-by-approach experiences by using a device everyone already owns: the smartphone.

“Our culture revolves around listening to the customer, and that’s what we do to evolve. We’ve improved our pioneering technology. Our solution is even more complete to meet the needs of customers, helping them to sell more and take their business to the next level,” says Caio Fiuza, partner and COO of Stone, responsible for Ton.

The novelty is that TapTon now uses a Mastercard certification that allows you to make purchases above R $200.00 (with the request for the password), which was not possible in the previous version of the solution and continues to offer the highest standards of security to its customers. For the trader, in addition to being able to accept payments by approximation in amounts above R $200, the main advantages are the exemption of the amounts of access to the traditional machine and the possibility of starting to sell at the same time that the user accesses the app, without having to wait for the arrival of a sales terminal and the qualification of flags. In addition, the technology allows scanning smaller trades that accept only cash payments.

This technology grows in a scenario where the changes adopted or driven by the pandemic are increasingly consolidated as a habit among Brazilian consumers. According to Mastercard’s New Payments Index study, 86% of Brazilian respondents used at least one digital payment method last year. Of these, 56% used approximate payments.

“We have seen the advance of different forms of payment, and payments by approximation are one of the preferred modalities for offering practicality and convenience quickly and safely,” says Estanislau Bassols, President of Mastercard Brazil. “For small and medium-sized entrepreneurs this is an opportunity to increase digitization and business security, reduce delinquency, and improve the end consumer experience,” he concludes.