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Interac in Canada and Sequent, a payments tokenization provider, have partnered to make it easier to add loyalty points, air miles, digitised cards in smartphone apps, and other types of tokens to platforms handling international digital payments.

Under the terms of the agreement, Sequent will provide Interac’s Canadian bank users with access to a tokenization Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for networks outside of Canada. The deal will result in a white-labelled version of Interac’s contact and contactless EMV specification being accessible to consumers using networks outside of Canada. It will be particularly useful in the mobile payments field.

Interact manages an average of 16 million Canadian payment transactions daily. The Canadian provider can link banks’ back-end IT systems, and offer fast, yet not instant, payment solutions to financial institutions (FIs).

“We are essentially making it easier for our international licensees to provision card credentials to a smartphone,” said James Good, head of international business development at the Interac Association and Acxsys Corporation, in a statement.

“This deal will be particularly useful for licensees who might otherwise not have been interested in or capable of investing the time, effort and upfront capital needed to create their own in-house tokenization solution,” added Good.

“Regional and national networks throughout the world are moving their platforms forward to support tokenization and, at the same time, looking for the most economical and functional paths to extra functionality that are possible,” said John Kirst, chief revenue officer at Sequent. “Interac has been a long-standing leader in contactless and mobile adoption. We believe the combination of our technologies and experience represents a compelling proposition to payment network operators.”

With the addition of Sequent’s tokenization technology and an open Application Programming Interface (API) and Software Development Kit (SDK) architecture, international licensees of Interac’s dual interface EMV specification will now be able to offer an advanced mobile payment solution to their clients. It should them build better customer-facing tools.