When Tio Payments Systems Goes Live: ‘We Are Just Getting Started’

Tio, a payment technology company based in Singapore, has unveiled a payment system called TioPay, which lets people buy and sell goods and services using their smartphone’s touch screen.
Tio is seeking to make payments more convenient and reliable, and to offer more privacy and security than existing methods, according to a statement.
The company has been working on the product since late February, and its first public test is scheduled for the end of the month.
The Tio system will integrate with the existing Tio payments platform, but it will be free for all.
The payments company is launching Tio Pay, its new payment system for mobile devices, in the US.
“We are just getting started,” Tio CEO Ankit Sengupta told Reuters in an interview.
The system is an attempt to address a big problem: the growing number of people using smartphones to make payment.
“In the next 10 years, there will be 2 billion people worldwide,” Senguptas said.
“So we’re just at the beginning of making the payments that we want to make.”
With Tio’s new platform, people can easily transfer money to and from friends and family, pay bills, or make purchases, the company said.
The process is easy: users swipe their smartphones over the QR code in the top left corner of their screen, which will pop up a list of Tio payment options.
“It’s not like you have to wait for a QR code to be scanned, which is a hassle when you’re using a credit card,” said Tio chief executive Anil Vij.
“And we’ve been working hard on the QR codes.”
Tio has already added a payment option to its website for its customers in the United States.
But for Tio to expand to other countries, the service has to reach the same level of adoption in the country where it’s launched.
The United Kingdom and Canada are expected to become the first two countries to use Tio by the end for mobile payments.
“Tio is the next big step forward,” Vij said.
In the US, Tio will also be the first company to allow people to make credit card payments using a QR codes, but that will be made available only to people who have an active Tio account, the same way that other Tio services do.
It’s also a sign that Tio might have a shot at gaining traction in the increasingly crowded field of mobile payments, where companies like PayPal, Amazon Payments, and Square have made significant efforts to gain a foothold in the market.
“Our approach to mobile payments has been a bit different than those of our competitors, where we focus on the traditional payments space,” said Paul Pascale, chief executive of PayPal.
“With Tio we are trying to address the real problems people are having in the payments space.
We are making payments as easy as possible.”
The company recently acquired an existing competitor, SquarePay, to offer its services on Tio.
The new payment platform will be available to all users in the U.S. and Canada starting next month.
“There are some very good reasons for TIO to be able to launch this product, and it’s going to be a big step for us,” Vij told Reuters.
“That said, we are also focused on getting Tio users around the world.
It will be a very big challenge to get them to use our system on their devices.”
The Tios first launch will come in the coming weeks, but the company plans to launch the product in the first quarter of 2018.
“I think the launch is going to give us a good first impression of what the general consumer is looking for in their mobile payments experience,” Vij added.
“This will give us more confidence in our product, which we believe is going for a very good start.”
Tios founder Anil Pandey has said that Tios mobile payments product is “just getting started.”
“Our focus right now is to get our product to market and make it as good as it can be, and we have some really good partners that we are looking to bring to the table,” Pandey said in a blog post.
“To be clear, this is a very small team and it is going through a lot of iterations to get it to this point.
But we’re confident that we can get it right and we will be bringing more partners soon.”