Viva.com & Conecs partner to accept payments with Meal Vouchers

By Gloria Methri

Viva.com has become the first acquirer in France to enable physical and digital Meal Voucher card transactions via its viva.com|Terminal app. The meal voucher card can be embedded in any smart device used by hospitality businesses, ranging from smartphones to desktop cashiers.

This development was made possible through Viva’s partnership with Conecs, a technical operator of dematerialized Meal Voucher transactions in France.

In France, 6 million employees benefit from Meal Vouchers, spending nearly €8 billion per year, with a staggering 70% currently using meal voucher cards. This partnership, which aims to help facilitate 600 million Meal Voucher transactions per year, is another step towards liberating the payments infrastructure in France.

To start accepting Meal Vouchers, restaurants are simply required to download the viva.com|Terminal app and provide their Conecs Identification Number. Enhancing the versatility of the app, Meal Voucher acceptance has been integrated into its array of 38+ payment methods, encompassing international card schemes and local card schemes, with CB included.

Samy Touboul, Head of E-Commerce & Enterprise at Viva.com France said, “It is exciting to be the first acquirer to accept Meal Vouchers in France, via our tap-on device technology. At Viva.com we are focusing on curating seamless payment checkout journeys. This new partnership with Conecs, which will support several million Meal Voucher customers and thousands of restaurants and hospitality businesses across France, represents a huge leap forward in the payments revolution that’s currently unfolding.”

Frédéric Amsler, Deputy Managing Director at Conecs said, “While the Meal Voucher is popular with the French and that a large majority of employees now use it in a dematerialized form with Conecs-labeled Meal Voucher cards, we are happy to count Viva.com among our key partners. Viva.com shares with Conecs the same values of excellence and innovation and aims, like Conecs, to streamline the payment process for the greatest benefit of restaurants and their customers. This partnership is the concrete expression of our ambition to always offer the best acceptance network in France to beneficiaries of our customers’ Meal Voucher cards.”