By our portfolio company MagicCube’s co-founders, Nancy Zayed and Sam Shawki
Just like they were ahead of the curve in dealing with COVID-19, South Korea has been at the forefront of contactless payment since its launch of UPass in 1995. Seoul’s transit authority offered one of the world’s first contactless payment systems, offering riders a quick, easy way to pay for bus rides.
Over 25 years later, it has taken a pandemic for us to recognize the urgency with which we should be moving forward with digital transactions. But now is certainly the time. The need for social distancing has rendered the average cash transaction an unnecessary health hazard to those at-risk and propagates the transmission of the disease. We now have the technology to mitigate this unnecessary risk, so why not accelerate the transition to digitized transactions?
MagicCube has the answer. We are extremely proud to introduce i-Accept™, a complete software-based replacement for traditional payment acceptance terminals. Through i-Accept™, acquiring banks and disruptive financial services institutions can now enable their merchants and retailers to accept contactless cards, including those from American Express®, Discover®, Mastercard®, and Visa®, as well as capture financial PINs and other verification methods, without the need for additional hardware or terminals. This out-of-the-box functionality supports modern mobile and IoT connected devices and is made possible through MagicCube's next-generation security platform that's supported by all four major card networks.
MagicCube serves progressive banks and next-generation financial institutions by offering early-adopting customers a significant advantage over the competition, including hardware-grade protection, and that's delivered purely through software and is easily scalable and deployable. Banks and merchants may now forgo buying and subsidizing the expensive, single-function card acceptance hardware devices, and instead deploy apps secured by MagicCube that, starting with Android, can turn any consumer device into an acceptance point.
i-Accept™ provides end-to-end functionality, security, and modern acceptance capabilities previously limited to hardware-based terminals. The entirely software-based solution is designed with global standards like SoftPos, SpoC/PIN on Glass/PIN on Mobile, CPoC, and Tap&PIN in mind. The product offers near plug-and-play, fully contained modules that can fit into the current flows of most modern acquiring bank or merchant acceptance solutions. Powerful features, like over-the-air upgrades, remote provisioning, risk management and mitigation, remote attestation, and compliance enables i-Accept™ to be easily integrated using simple APIs, deployed rapidly, and operated easily.
We are excited to empower the market to drop legacy, expensive devices and use pure software to enable cross-system workflows, yet maintain a high-security posture and provide operational excellence. It is not just how you do UX or distribute the software. We have to get rid of hardware complexity and its high-cost maintenance in favor of the simplicity, ubiquity, and operability of secure software solutions. Now is the time, and i-Accept™ is the answer.
About MagicCube
MagicCube was awarded the first recognition of a software-based Trusted Execution Environment (sTEE) issued by EMVCo, the global consortium which facilitates worldwide interoperability and acceptance of secure payment transactions, for its SDT platform. The technology enables large-scale deployment and management of IoT and mobile-secure solutions to consumers. MagicCube has been named to Network World's '10 Hot IoT Startups to Watch' list, listed as a Cool Vendor in Security and Risk Management by Gartner, and partners with the PCI Security Standards Council. For more information, visit www.magiccube.co.
Learn more
MagicCube Unveils i-Accept the World's First Software-Based Replacement for Traditional Payment Terminals Supporting Tap&PIN for all four major card networks
An attempt to make point-of-sale payment devices obsolete
Visa Expands Tap To Phone To 15 Countries