Digital payments company ToneTag, in which Amazon has made an equity investment, is looking to offer new payment usecases. This is as per a report in the Economic Times. ToneTag’s sound wave technology will also be integrated for payment on delivery for Amazon customers, which is expected to go live in three-four months.
ToneTag enables proximity-based contactless payments through sound. With this technology, anyone with any device, even feature phones with or without internet can pay contactless. Using encrypted sound waves, ToneTag communicates with the merchant’s Point-of-Sale (POS) system. ToneTag can be integrated with any POS system, digital wallets, or payment apps. It can work on any operating system – iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux.
Amazon has invested nearly $5 million in ToneTag, which also saw participation from Mastercard and existing investors 3one4 Capital and Elevate Innovation Partners as part of the recent round, according to regulatory filings of the company. Payments is a big focus area for Amazon, and the investment in ToneTag seems to be a step towards creating a payment ecosystem.
Source: Entrackr
ToneTag was launched in 2013 by Kumar Abhishek and Vivek Singh. The company has claimed a reach of 50 million consumers with 300K merchants.
The integration with ToneTag will instantly give Amazon offline touchpoints for payments. ToneTag’s sound wave technology will also be integrated for payment on delivery for Amazon customers, which is expected to go live in three-four months. “Customers will be able to use Amazon Pay at three lakh offline merchants that we have partnered with,” said ToneTag CEO Kumar Abhishek.
Apart from this, Amazon customers may also get new usecases to make payments through ToneTag’s sound wave technology. For example, one usecase is to offer Amazon Prime customers in India frictionless payment experience even outside of the platform, such as the option to walk out of restaurants without physically paying the bill.
“We can offer the ‘Eat and Go’ option to customers by leveraging the sound wave technology for automatically generating and paying the bill,” Abhishek said. ToneTag looks to offer this service exclusively to Amazon Prime customers at about 8,000 restaurants in about 12 months.
