No PIN required in new Visa deal

CUSTOMERS AT BWG’s Spar, Eurospar, Mace and XL stores will soon be able to pay for goods using “contactless” card technology under a deal announced between BWG and Visa.

BWG is expected to roll out the technology in the majority of its 900 stores by the end of the year in the biggest adoption of the technology in Ireland to date. Centra, with 464 stores, is also to introduce the technology.

Contactless technology allows customers to pay for purchases under €15 by placing their Visa card momentarily over paypads in stores rather than using the chip-and-pin function. Once €15 is reached, customers are prompted to enter a PIN code. The method is aimed at customers buying smaller items and aims to speed up the payment process.

According to BWG, the payment method will most likely be used in its convenience stores where the average transaction size is less than €10.

“We expect it to perform very well in this space,” BWG Foods managing director Willie O’Byrne said. “It will provide an additional layer of convenience for our shoppers, who will benefit directly from reduced queues and faster throughput at no extra cost.”

He also said that the company hopes to benefit from the expected surge in the use of the technology once Bank of Ireland and AIB switch from Laser debit cards to Visa Debit this year.

The new Visa Debit cards will be fitted with the contactless technology. Bank of Ireland alone will begin issuing around a million cards in the next few weeks.

According to Conor Langford of Visa Ireland, a number of retailers are due to announce the uptake of the service in the coming months. In the UK, around 100,000 terminals have been upgraded to accept contactless payments, with a number of major retailers and service providers such as McDonald’s, WH Smith and the London bus network already offering the service.

According to Mr Langford, contactless payments pave the way for the introduction of payments via mobile phones. “From the retailer’s perspective, once the technology is set up the system is mobile-ready.”

He said that Visa was working with a number of stakeholders in the Irish mobile phone industry about introducing the payment technology into handsets. The technology, which will allow customers to pay for goods through personal mobile phones by placing the handset momentarily over paypads in stores, is intended to be in place by 2013.

Mr O’Byrne said that while retailers had to update their terminals in order to facilitate the contactless payments, around 25 to 30 per cent of terminals were already replaced on an annual basis. “The key advantage for retailers is that terminals will be effectively mobile ready from day one. This is a major opportunity to tap into what will be effectively a mass issuance of new contactless cards in the coming months,” he said.

According to Visa, contactless cards are subject to the same level of consumer protection as all Visa cards.

However, the total value of consecutive contactless transactions is limited, and from time to time the cardholder will be prompted to undertake a full chip and PIN transaction. Outlets, and the cards themselves, will display a contactless symbol.