Money goes mobile
Everything Everywhere and Barclaycard will launch the UK's first commercial contactless mobile payments service as early as this summer, allowing customers to buy products from around 40,000 high street shops using their mobile.
The duo reckon their move will offer shoppers a more simple and convenient way to pay for goods, ‘revolutionising' the way payments are made on the UK high street in the biggest shake-up since the introduction of credit cards in the UK 40 years ago.
2011 seems to be fast shaping up as the year for mobile payments, with Apple rumoured to introduce Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology to the next generation of its iPhone and iPad. Google too has made NFC support a key feature of Android 2.3, while Apple's partner ARM has been putting a lot of effort into its ‘click and PIN' and smartcard technologies- it just remains to be seen whether consumers will be happy changing the way they shop.
Gerry McQuade, CDO at Everything Everywhere, said: "This is the beginning of a revolution in how we pay for things on the high street. It's a cultural shift that is as important as the launch of the personal credit card or ATMs."
He reckons it will soon ‘be the norm' for people to buy snacks, tickets and even pricey items like computers using a mobile payment system.
The two companies are working with ‘leading handset manufacturers' to support the technology, which consumers will be able to use to buy goods at over 40,000 retailers, simply by waving their phone in front of a contactless reader. The first mobile payment service will be made available through the Orange brand, with Barclaycard and Orange customers the first to use the technology.
David Chan, CEO of Barclaycard Consumer Europe, predicted that the mobile payment market will experience ‘explosive growth'.
"I believe that future generations will find it surprising that early this century we were still carrying separate items to buy goods and to communicate with each other. As payment experts, our role is to make it easier, more convenient and incredibly secure for people to make purchases and manage their money while on the move," he said.
One of the biggest concerns with such technology is the security of transactions and the launch proposition will focus on an industry-backed, SIM-based approach to payments to ensure secure transactions and provide a single point of customer care contact, according to the companies. MasterCard will provide the payment capability for the contactless mobile transactions.
Apparently some 11.6m contactless credit and debit cards are already in circulation, around 10m of which have been issued by Barclaycard and Barclays and there are already 42,500 live Barclaycard contactless terminals in retail outlets including: Pret a Manger, EAT, Little Chef and, soon, Co-Op.
Everything Everywhere promised more details about the roll-out in ‘the forthcoming months'.
