Handset manufacturer BlackBerry has continued its efforts to reinvent its business by moving into the mobile payments systems business.
The company announced a three year deal with EnStream, a joint venture owned by three of Canada’s biggest telecoms companies, Bell, Rogers and Telus, to provide the infrastructure for a payment platform using near field communication (NFC) technology.
Under the deal, EnStream will use BlackBerry’s existing infrastructure to securely store payment information and enable transactions between banks and mobile operators on any smartphone able to use NFC.
The system has already gained the support of several leading Canadian banking institutions, with the Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce already signed up, with BlackBerry hoping to take it to other countries later on.
"BlackBerry has proven through our decades of experience in enterprise mobility that we have the ideal infrastructure and security capabilities to protect users’ data when new capabilities such as mobile payments emerge," said John Sims, president of global enterprise services at BlackBerry.
BlackBerry’s encryption technology, which is US government-level privacy certified, is famously a source of pride for the company, with its handsets a popular choices for agencies that regularly handle highly sensitive information. But with customers now increasingly using their devices for shopping and banking, ensuring a high level has now become paramount for many organisations.
"Together with EnStream and partners like them around the world, BlackBerry can better reach customers and provide a complete solution for banks with opportunities in the mobile payments space," Sims added.
The announcement is the latest from BlackBerry as it looks to reinvent itself under new CEO John Chen, who took over the company in November 2013. Chen has refocused BlackBerry’s attentions from Western consumer markets, concentrating on key areas such as Indonesia, alongside a more general shift towards business customers.
Earlier this month at the BlackBerry Experience event in London, the firm’s senior VP for Europe, Markus Mueller, outlined how BlackBerry would be focusing its efforts on the enterprise space, including software solutions that would make the company the "true mobility platform provider".
BlackBerry does have previous experience in the payments industry, having launched its BBM Money service in Indonesia in February 2013, which allowed customers to transfer funds and conduct other types of financial transactions using the BBM instant messaging service.
Recent Gartner studies estimate that the value of mobile payments will grow from $35bn in 2012 to $173bn in 2017, an annual growth rate of 31%.
