Visa: Year of Olympics will be watershed for contactless payments

The 2012 Olympics is expected to be a technology showcase for both contactless and NFC payments

This year will be a watershed for contactless payments, with the London 2012 Olympics acting as a showcase for the technology, according to a senior technologist at Visa.

Speaking at BT's Olympics themed event Race to the Line, which took place earlier this week, Colin Grannell, executive vice president of partnership marketing at Visa, provided details of the technology to be deployed around the Olympic venues to enable contactless payments to be made.

"We're placing around 3,000 of the latest payment devices enabling contactless transactions around Olympic venues.

"We're using London 2012 to showcase the technology and demonstrate how quickly we can process payments."

He added that contactless technology will become more commonplace this year, with other firms also increasingly enabling it as a method of payment.

"This will be the year in which contactless payment takes off. There will be 350 Coca-Cola vending machines around Olympic venues taking contactless payment.

"In addition, all London buses will take contactless payment in time for the Olympics, with the London Underground accepting the technology later in the year."

Fast food chain McDonald's introduced contactless payment technology into its UK restaurants in May last year, but admitted at the time that it expected the service to be used only rarely at first.

However, contactless is not the only payment technology expected to reach a tipping point this year.

According to Grannell, near-field communications (NFC), in which smartphones or other devices can transact when in proximity to a payment endpoint, will also see increasing use.

"We expect the London 2012 Olympics to be the first showcase of near-field communications payments with smartphones.

"Samsung has the official Olympics payment NFC app, which is processed by Visa. Other suppliers can use an alterntive app, it just won't be Olympics branded."

On the security of these transaction methods, Grannell was confident that Visa already has the correct procedures in place.

"Anti-fraud measures will be important during the Games. Every UK transaction will be chip and pin. We take fraud extremely seriously as a matter of course, so we're not expecting to do anything differently for the Games."