Visa to test contactless payment
Shoppers trial new payment method
Visa is to trial contactless debit cards in London this autumn to allow shoppers to pay for low-value goods by passing their card over an electronic reader.
Royal Bank of Scotland has already announced plans to trial contactless MasterCards for 1,000 of its staff at its Edinburgh campus headquarters.
Guido Mangiagalli, head of new channels for Visa Europe, says banks are interested in adopting contactless payment using chip-and-PIN cards.
‘This is not an infrastructure replacement, it is simply an upgrade and will cost about $100 (£53) to add contactless functionality to a terminal,’ he said.
‘Contactless is an existing technology, and Visa and the European member banks do not want to replace the chip-and-PIN payment method. The full deployment of the cards will be phased in with the normal lifecycle of the card.
‘We’ve worked with banks on this and the business case is quite positive because of the
volume of low-value payments that are made.’
But experts say that widespread adoption is unlikely in the short term, and they expect resistance to investment in a new payment infrastructure following the recent mass adoption of chip-and-PIN.
‘British banks have just paid a huge amount of money to deploy contact-based chip-and-PIN systems,’ said Forrester Research analyst Benjamin Ensor.
Mark Bowerman, spokesman for banking industry body Apacs said: ‘The cost for the retailers are still unknown – if they are prohibitive then it might not make a business case for it.’
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