Edenred France, Orange and MasterCard team up to test mobile payments of meal vouchers

While the habits of Ticket Restaurant® card holders have already revealed extensive usage of contactless payments, Edenred France now plans to offer its beneficiaries the option of mobile payments, which have become a part of consumers' everyday lives.

In a test that started in October 2014 with Orange and MasterCard, leaders on their markets and in the forefront of mobile payments, a panel of users can pay for their meals with their smartphones in restaurants affiliated to Ticket Restaurant® and equipped with a contactless payment terminal.

The pilot uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, which has already been deployed in France by telephone operators and banks to make quick and secure transactions using the data stored on the SIM cards in mobile phones.
'As the leader on the French meal voucher market, we are keen to prepare for the future by testing mobile payments in order to offer even more services to our beneficiaries and affiliated merchants. We will make this new service available to our clients as soon as possible, in view of the progress that mobile payments are making in France,' explains Laurent Delmas, Managing Director of Edenred France.

2014: a pivotal year for Ticket Restaurant® in France

First invented in 1962 by Edenred, Ticket Restaurant® intends to continue its development with a multiple-medium offer. Nine months after the official launch of the transition to the card, Edenred France leads the shift to digital, with almost 80,000 Ticket Restaurant® card users, 35% of whom were not beneficiaries of the paper version of the meal vouchers. Edenred has made more than 3 million card transactions since the digital solution was launched.
In 2013, 3.5 million employees in France used meal vouchers, of whom 1.2 million benefited from the Ticket Restaurant® solution.