London gets ready for contactless payments

No PIN, no signing, no touch required

By Chip Mulligan: Saturday 25 November 2006, 19:41

DETAILS WERE ANNOUNCED of the initial London roll out of a new wave 
of contactless debit cards, credit cards and pre-pay cards for payments
under [Pounds]10.

An extension to the existing Chip and PIN EMV network, Maestro /
MasterCard's PayPass and Visa's contactless system will allow users 
to pay for small goods such as rail tickets, newspapers and beers by
waving their card in front of an RFID sensor on a point of sale or
vending machine.

[...]

Initial trials in Scotland, and elsewhere across the world, have 
shown very positive feedback from customers and merchants alike, 
with cardholders liking the ease-of-use and speed, and merchants 
the reduced hassle, especially having to haul less cash around at 
the end of the day.

The London roll out, itself, will be quite an ambitious affair, with
over half a million new cards issued, and 4,000 updated chip and pin
readers with built-in RFID sensor sent to over a thousand shops within
the central city area and Docklands, starting from September 2007.

By the beginning of 2008 it will start to be rolled out across the
whole of the UK, provided any bugs that have been shown up in the
initial launch have been ironed out. 

[...]

One thing is certain: the government and banks are serious, and see
this as a war on cash. Official figures estimate that handling of
physical cash is a [Pounds]4 billion drain on the economy. We can 
only hope that it goes slightly better than their war on terror

                              -==-

Full article at "The Inquirer"
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35968


Cheers, Steve..

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