History
Mobil was one of the most notable early adopters of this technology, and offered their "Speedpass" contactless payment system for participating Mobil gas stations as early as 1997. Although Mobil has since merged with Exxon, the service is still offered at many of ExxonMobil's stations.
McDonald's, The Co-operative Group, Boots, EAT., Heron Foods, Pret a Manger, Stagecoach Group, Subway (restaurant) and AMT Coffee are among the retailers offering contactless payments to their customers in the UK. In March 2008 EAT. became the first restaurant chain to adopt contactless.
Major financial entities now offering contactless payment systems include MasterCard, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, KeyBank, The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Barclays, Barclaycard, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group. Visa PayWave, American Express ExpressPay, and Mastercard PayPass are examples of contactless credit cards which have become widespread in US and UK. The UK (and the rest of the world) version of the contactless applications differ from the US one. The UK version has the capability of transacting offline, based on the limit stored in the application.
The first contactless cards in the UK were issued by Barclaycard in 2008. As of June 2010 there are approximately 9.6 million contactless-enabled cards, representing 7% of all cards, in circulation in the UK, with Barclaycard and Barclays leading the roll-out with eight million contactless-enabled cards in circulation and 25,000 terminals in use as of July 2010. HSBC and Lloyds TSB have now started rolling out contactless debit cards
Telecom operators are starting to get involved in contactless payments via the use of near field communication phones. Belgacom's Pingping - Belgium, for example, has a stored value account and via a partnership with Alcatel-Lucent's touchatag provides contactless payment functionalities. In January 2010, Barclaycard partnered with mobile phone firm Orange, to launch a contactless credit card in the UK. Orange and Barclaycard also announced in 2009 that they will be launching a mobile phone with contactless technology.
In October 2011, the first mobile phones with Mastercard Paypass and/or VISA Paywave certification appeared. A PayPass or Paywave account can be assigned to the embedded secure element and/or SIM card within the phones. Google wallet uses handsets with embedded secure element. ISIS, Cityzi and Quick Tap wallets for example, use a secure SIM card to store encrypted personal information. Contactless payments with enabled mobile phones still occur on a small scale, but every month an increasing number of mobile phones is certified.
Read more about this topic: Contactless Payment
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