CBA moving fast on contactless

Commonwealth Bank is pressing on with plans to update its fleet of payment terminals to cater to contactless payments.

Andrew Cheesman, general manager merchant solutions at CBA, yesterday said the bank was dispatching between 800 and 1000 terminals a week to merchants.
Cheesman was speaking at a FST Media conference in Melbourne yesterday on the future of payments.

In late 2009 CBA set a goal of installing 5000 terminals by early 2010 and later upgraded that to a target of 15,000 by the end 2010. The bank seems bound to surpass this target based on current activity.

Commonwealth Bank has around 190,000 Eftpos terminals in Australia across its merchant base, and around 48 per cent of the entire market, measured by terminal numbers, based on data published by APRA.

What percentage of these CBA aims to replace is not clear, though plans to upgrade terminals at large merchants is dependent on the willingness of those merchants to expedite any shift to contactless payments.

CBA has 3.5 million chip cards, which work with contactless payment terminals, on issue Cheesman said. This is up from two million cards in the third quarter of 2009.