Proactive Macau Pass Prospering

The city’s stored-value card issuer Macau Pass SA aims to enable its smartphone application users to pay for their water supply and power bills by next month, an extension of functions following the company’s enabling their value top-up functions for the Macau Pass cards since December last year. “Through our mobile phone application, we hope that by next month users can use it to pay for their water and power bills, as well as making donations to charity units like Caritas and Orbis,” deputy general manager of Macau Pass David Lao told Business Daily. “For these new functions now we’re undergoing some internal testing.” Macau Pass announced in mid-December the launch of a new mobile phone application for users of smartphones running on Android systems and a near field communication (NFC) function, which allows them to top up their value, read their remaining balance as well as transaction records by a simple scanning of the card. So far, however, the top-up value function via the smartphone application is only applicable to those who have bought the Macau Pass chip cards for which they can add value to their cards from payments made off their credit card accounts. This function is now only ready for holders of credit cards issued by OCBC Wing Hang Ltd (Macau) and Bank of China Credit Card (International) Ltd. “We hope that after two to three months, we’ll be announcing a second batch of co-operating banks that support our top-up value functions,” Mr. Lao said. “Our goal is to collaborate with all the major banks here.” Online shopping The stored-value card issuer has also confirmed that they had had “preliminary talks” with Hong Kong-listed Tradelink Electronic Commerce Ltd. on its newly developed business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce platform known as ‘iTeM’ – a mobile phone application-based shopping platform that allows consumers to purchase cosmetics, electronic products and other health products. In its annual results filed with the stock exchange earlier this week, Tradelink said that they were currently in the phase of recruiting merchants for the e-commerce platform. “We did explore the issue [of co-operating with Tradelink] but it’s just some initial talks on the technical aspects only,” said Lao. “We did not make an official promise on that or ink any deals but definitely there’s always a chance of co-operation.” Macau Pass is in negotiations with China’s online shopping giant Alibaba Group regarding the provision of a mobile payment solution that allows users to shop on Taobao.com using their stored-value cards to make payments. “The scenario will be similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus online payment service, which is a mobile payment service that allows stored-value card users to shop on Taobao,” Mr. Lao told us, “That is our desired picture for consumers here to use our card to pay for the online shopping website. But the key issue now is the settling of cross-border payments.” While Macau Pass has yet to complete talks on online shopping co-operation, the company has recently announced its collaboration with the city’s major telco Companhia de Telecomunicacoes de Macau SARL (CTM) to launch a mobile payment service by integrating Macau Pass IC card with the smartphone SIM cards. This service, as yet unnamed, is expected to come online by the third quarter of this year when CTM launches its 4G service. Through CTM’s mobile network, customers are able to make payment simply by touching the smartphone on Macau Pass readers as if using an IC card, according to the telco and Macau Pass.