Visa and NAB chip in on contactless payments

NAB and Visa announced yesterday that the bank will roll out 2500 contactless card readers to Australian merchants by Christmas, starting with 500 merchants in Melbourne this month.

To match the market penetration of Eftpos Visa, NAB and other banks will need to roll out another 655,000 contactless readers. Banks install 50,000 more Eftpos readers at merchants each year.

The readers will be connected up to NAB EMV terminals free of charge, though the bank has yet to begin issuing NFC cards to its customers.

Visa PayWave, MasterCard PayPass, and American ExpressPay all support the same standard for Radio Frequency (RF) cards—ISO 14443 A/B - meaning that any reader should be able to acquire transactions from any NFC card.

Visa's Australian chief executive Chris Clark says getting the readers out in the marketplace has been the priority.

"Our experience in other markets is that getting the acceptance infrastructure up and running is the primary thing that needs to be done.

"Card issuers will obviously do a lot of CRM research on which of the segments of their card holders, based on their usage behaviour, are most applicable to issue these cards to."

Steve Aliferis, executive general manager working capital solutions at NAB, said that the bank intends to start issuing the Visa PayWave cards to their customers in the near future.

"It is about identifying that demographic that best fits the profile that supports contactless requirements."

Commonwealth Bank has been slowly rolling out MasterCard PayPass readers since a trial in NSW in 2007. At that time, Commonwealth Bank said 50,000 CBA MasterCard cardholders each month were receiving the new MasterCard PayPass enabled cards as their existing cards expired.