LONDON -- SIA and Orange Business Services have signed a collaboration agreement that will enable European and extra-EU banks and merchants to manage payments via mobile point of sale (POS) terminals.

More specifically, Orange Business Services will provide a managed M2M solution with global roaming services enabling remote terminals to automatically transmit data to the SIA technology infrastructure. The agreement will allow SIA to take a significant step forward in the creation of a single operating network at the European level which will collect payments traffic generated by wireless POS terminals and other channels of merchants and then deliver it securely and reliably to the authorization systems of banks, terminal operators and other acquirers.

At present, SIA has enabled almost 5,000 mobile POS terminals and plans to reach around 60,000 terminals by the end of the year. These devices can manage transactions coming mainly from European countries (including France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom) and extra-EU countries, such as South Africa.

"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."