Cantaloupes Seed Cashless Vending Machines Are Now Android Pay Ready

SAN FRANCISCO -- Cantaloupe Systems, a provider of cloud-based, mobile technologies for vending machines, said its technology now supports Android Pay. Google's new contactless payment system will be preinstalled on virtually all new Android handsets from Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T, and will be backward compatible with most Android handsets in the market that have NFC and KitKat+ support.

All vending machines running Seed Cashless will accept Android Pay. This new capability requires no hardware upgrade and no additional cost to vending operators who use Seed Cashless, Cantaloupe reported.

Google's Android Pay will replace the Internet titan's mobile payment offerings, Google Wallet and Softcard, which Google acquired earlier this year. Those products also use NFC technology, but require multiple steps to use. Google Wallet is reimagined as a peer-to-peer app that can send cash between friends.

Android Pay boasts a more streamlined user experiences: simply unlock the phone and tap. In addition to Android Pay, Cantaloupe's Seed Cashless accepts traditional credit and debit card payments from Visa and MasterCard, credit cards from American Express and Discover, and mobile payments through Apple Pay, Visa Checkout and MasterCard Contactless.

"Seed Cashless was born ready for mobile payments. We've always included NFC technology in every card reader because we predicted that the payments industry would eventually coalesce on NFC and we didn't want our customers to get stuck with swipe-only hardware that would soon become obsolete," said Cantaloupe president and customer relationships officer Anant Agrawal.

Sometimes referred to as contactless or "swipeless," mobile payments are not yet mainstream, but will grow from $52 billion in transactions in 2014 to $142 billion by 2019, according to a Forrester report cited by Agrawal. Another study by Gartner suggests that by 2017 mobile commerce revenue will account for 50% of all U.S. digital commerce, which is now 22%.