Contactless Payment

Contactless payment systems are credit cards and debit cards, key fobs, smart cards, or other devices, including smartphones and other mobile devices, that use radio-frequency identification (RFID) or near-field communication (NFC) for making secure payments. The embedded integrated circuit chip and antenna enable consumers to wave their card, fob, or handheld device over a reader at the point-of-sale terminal. Contactless payments are made in close physical proximity, unlike other types of mobile payments which use broad-area cellular or Wi-Fi networks and do not involve close physical proximity.

EMV (abbreviation for Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) is a common standard used by major credit card and smartphone companies for use in general commerce. Contactless smart cards that function as stored-value cards are becoming popular for use as transit system farecards, such as the Oyster card (London, UK) or RioCard (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). These can often store non-currency value (such as monthly passes), in additional to fare value purchased with cash or electronic payment.

Apple Pay on iPhones and Google Pay on Android mobile phones are common forms of contactless payments used. These types of payments use tokenization which encapsulates a card issuer's details within the mobile phone.

Some suppliers claim that transactions can be almost twice as fast as a conventional cash, credit, or debit card purchase. Because no signature or PIN verification is typically required, contactless purchases are usually limited to small value sales. Lack of authentication provides a window during which fraudulent purchases can be made while the card owner is unaware of the card's loss.
Major financial institutions and multinational corporations now offer contactless payment systems to customers as contactless credit cards have become widespread in the US, UK, Japan, Germany, Canada, Australia, France, the Netherlands, etc., as consumers are likely to spend more money using their cards due to the ease of small transactions. With contactless cards growing in numbers and percentages of adoption, the number of payments by this method had increased significantly since the spending limit was raised. Purchases made by card now surpass those made by cash and account for approximately one-third of all card transactions in countries like the UK. Contactless payments specifically have become increasingly popular, accounting for 4 out of 5 point-of-sale credit card purchases in Australia as of 2019. Card issuers indicate that they will increase the availability of contactless cards to consumers. As of October 2021 there are over 142 million contactless-enabled cards and over 147,000 terminals in use in the UK alone. Visa estimated that there would be 300 million contactless cards issued in the US by the end of 2020, up from the predicted 100 million at the end of 2019.

History

1990s—2000s

Mobil was one of the most notable early adopters of a similar 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. Freedompay also had early wins in the contactless space with Bank of America and McDonald's.

In 2002, Philips teamed up with Sony to elaborate the NFC standard. Then Philips Semiconductors applied for the six fundamental patents of NFC, invented by the Austrian and French engineers Franz Amtmann and Philippe Maugars who received the European Inventor Award in 2015.

In July 2004, Sony, who had implemented the contactless RFID smart card FeliCa in Japan, introduced the system (literal translation: " wallet-phone") developed with the mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo on multiple FeliCa systems such as Edy and, on 28 January 2006, on Mobile Suica used primarily on the railway networks owned by JR East.

In May 2005, after some experimentation in the Netherlands, the contactless deferred payment at the end of each month, after the registration of the trips aboard with a contactless mobile phone on the client's account, was first experimented in Germany during 6 months on the tramways and bus of Hanau with the Nokia 3220 using the NFC standard of Philips and Sony.

In October 2005, the immediate contactless payment was first experimented in France in Caen during 6 months with a Samsung NFC smartphone by Orange in collaboration with Philips Semiconductors in the Cofinoga shops ( Galeries Lafayette, Monoprix) and Vinci parkings. For the first time, thanks to "Fly Tag", the system allowed to receive as well audiovisual informations, like bus timetables or cinema trailers from the concerned services. In June 2007, the payment with a contactless bank card was tested at the FNAC of La Défense in Paris and from 19 November 2007 to 2009 in some shops of Caen and Strasbourg, this time with smartphones NFC, provided by four operators (Orange, Bouygues Telecom, SFR and NRJ Mobile). On 5 November 2007, Orange and the transport societies SNCF and Keolis associated themselves for a 2 months experimentation with smartphones in Rennes in the metro, bus and TER trains.

The first contactless cards in the UK were issued by Barclaycard in September 2007. PayPass trialed the world's first NFC-enabled phone, the Nokia 6131 NFC, in New York in 2007.

In March 2008, Eat became the first restaurant chain to adopt contactless.

On 19 January 2009, NFC is used in transports for the first time in the world by China Unicom and Yucheng Transportation Card with Changhong DG28 and F4 mobile phones in the tramways and bus of Chongqing in China.

2010s

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 would be launching a mobile phone with contactless technology.

After a test conducted from October 2005 to November 2006 with 27 users, on 21 May 2010, the transport authority of Nice

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