Mark's Notebook


	Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. - Isaiah 1:18

Contactless credit cards

San Francisco Chronicle

Friday 17 February 2006, 12:35 pm
Keywords: Computer Topics , News Articles

by Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer

Credit-card outfits are pushing a new payment technology called contactless cards that could speed your way through the checkout line.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover are promoting the tap-and-go cards for use when buying something quick and cheap -- garlic fries at AT&T Park, a Slurpee at 7-Eleven, a prescription at Walgreens, a Happy Meal at McDonald's, or movie tickets at AMC, Loews, Regal and Cinemark theaters. All of those merchants are installing special terminals to read the cards.

With a contactless card, the cashier rings up your sale, you hold your card (or cell phone or key fob) an inch or two above a radio-frequency reader, which quickly flashes green and beeps to indicate that you've paid. For purchases of less than $25, no signature is required.

The concept is similar to the FasTrak transponders Bay Area commuters use to pay bridge tolls, except that contactless cards must be read at a much closer range.

Contactless-card transactions average 15 seconds, according to Visa. That's less than half the 34 seconds for cash transactions and about a third faster than the 24 seconds for payments using traditional credit cards with magnetic stripes that must be swiped, it said.

Discover is testing cell phones with contactless chips.

Nationwide, about 20,000 merchant locations have installed about 120,000 contactless readers in the past year, many of them concentrated in a few geographic regions, such as Atlanta and New York.

To get a card, go to a credit-card brand Web site and look for links to issuers that offer them. Rather than giving you another piece of plastic to carry in your wallet, banks will simply add the contactless chips to mag-stripe credit cards, debit cards or prepaid cards. Those cards will then work both for traditional mag-stripe devices and the new contactless readers.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/17/CONTACTLESS.TMP&nl=to
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