Global trends – Visa invests in a company that makes the POS terminal history. Just using an app, the mobile phone is transformed into a payment terminal.

„We want to enable sellers around the world to not only begin accepting digital and contactless payments, but also give them flexibility to do so in a way that is physically less constrained to a traditional point of sale,” Visa said.

MagicCube, the creator of the world’s only Software Trusted Execution Environment platform, today announced a strategic investment from Visa. Visa, which previously invested in the company, is renewing its support for MagicCube with this latest financing as the company continues to gain momentum in global partnerships and customers to bring its virtual TEE-based platform and solutions to scale.

MagicCube was awarded the first recognition of a software-based Trusted Execution Environment issued by EMVCo, the global consortium which facilitates worldwide interoperability and acceptance of secure payment transactions.

„Visa’s continued support of MagicCube shows how much potential there is in the new SDT category, which we are leading,” MagicCube CTO Nancy Zayed said. „Unlike legacy systems, we use virtualization that is upgradeable over the air, remotely manageable and can adapt quickly to new security threats. Powerful features like over the air upgrades, remote provisioning, risk management and mitigation provide a product that can be integrated using simple APIs, deployed rapidly and operated easily. These are key differentiators that set our technology apart from hardware-based security and traditional software obfuscation.”

As part of the investment, MagicCube and Visa will look to further their partnership by exploring new use cases in the payments industry, like Tap to Phone, where the platform can bring next-gen security, operability, and ease of integration.

„Sellers are looking for simple, low-barrier ways to offer digital payments and there may be nothing simpler than transforming an everyday device, such as a mobile phone, into a payment terminal,” said Mary Kay Bowman, global head of buyer and seller solutions, Visa. „By expanding our work with the team at MagicCube to scale softPOS technology, including Tap to Phone with PIN support, we want to enable sellers around the world to not only begin accepting digital and contactless payments, but also give them flexibility to do so in a way that is physically less constrained to a traditional point of sale.”

MagicCube’s products grant modern consumer devices the ability to read contactless cards from Visa and from all other major card brands while securely capturing financial PIN and other verification methods, including biometrics. The solution provides end-to-end functionality, security, and modern acceptance capabilities previously limited to hardware-based terminals. The entirely software-based solution offers a plug-and-play, fully contained module that can fit into the current flows of any modern acquiring bank or merchant acceptance solution.

MagicCube aims to serve progressive financial institutions and offer them a key differentiation that will grant early-adopters a huge advantage over the competition — hardware-grade protection that is „easily scalable and ready to deploy in days, not months”.

„With MagicCube’s technology, customers can now forgo buying and subsidizing expensive, single-function card acceptance devices, and instead use apps secured by MagicCube to accept point-of-sale payments,” the company said.

After being named to Network World’s ‘10 Hot IoT Startups to Watch‘ List, heralded as a Cool Vendor in Security and Risk Management by Gartner, and partnering with the PCI Security Standards Council, MagicCube is positioned to lead the SDT category, disrupting the current dominance of hardware-based security.