Verifone, a payments and commerce solutions provider, has announced that the company is leading an effort to define and implement the Conexxus Mobile Standard, a new Mobile API standard that aims to coordinate interactions between mobile payment and loyalty applications. Verifone helped create an open API to ensure consumer loyalty, rewards, and other value-added data can be integrated with merchant systems.

Verifone brought together mobile technology providers, POS manufacturers, and fuel marketers at Conexxus, a non-profit technology organization focused on the convenience store and petroleum market, to help accelerate the adoption of the Mobile API standard. The collaboration helped ensure that the API remained open and wouldn’t be developed on a proprietary interface implemented by numerous service providers.

"Further proliferation of closed solutions would have added significant technology complexity and support costs for retailers, making it difficult for them to select and deploy mobile solutions that best suit their needs, " stated Dan Yienger, Senior VP and GM of Verifone’s Global Petroleum business, for the press release. Verifone’s commitment to simplifying and enabling commerce is why we collaborated with our peers and Conexxus to set Mobile API standards for the industry as a whole."

The Verifone open API is NFC compatible and can be used by developers to build mobile applications capable of using the Verifone payment and point-of-sale services. The API enables consumer smartphones to interact with merchant systems. The group is working on deploying open payment solutions on retail branded and other types of applications. The group is also working with community banks to enable direct ACH payment at the pump.