contactless payment, page-11

Visa Readies Contactless-Payment Trial In UK

Visa Europe will launch a pilot of contactless payment in which consumers can make low-value purchases by tapping a smart card or key fob on a reader in the UK, Guido Mangiagalli, Visa Europe's head of new channels, tells Card Technology sister publication CardLine Europe. "We are in negotiations with a couple of our major members to trial a contactless product starting from September of this year," he says. "If the trials will be positive, they have a full strategy to deploy contactless commercially in 2007." Visa is also discussing contactless trials in other European countries, Mangiagalli adds, although he would not provide details. To achieve widespread acceptance of contactless payment in Europe, Mangiagalli says, merchants must first install point-of-sale terminals that include contactless readers. For that to happen, he adds, European countries must move to a payment system based on chip cards that comply with EMV, the global payment standard for smart cards. "Our contactless platform is built on top of EMV, so we need to have an EMV infrastructure well established," he says. "So the countries that we are targeting today are the countries that are in an advanced state of the deployment of EMV." (2006-04-06)