(April 25, 2007) Reversing a marketing decision it made two years ago, Visa USA has attached a brand name to its contactless-payment platform. The name, payWave, will identify Visa’s contactless technology around the world, serving the same function as MasterCard Worldwide’s PayPass and American Express Co.’s ExpressPay contactless brands. Although the bank card network is not requiring its issuers to use the brand name, it is hoping the new mark, which can work with both cards and mobile phones, will help accelerate recent adoption trends among consumers.

Visa saw on average a growth rate of 34% in contactless transactions each month last year, a rate of increase that continues so far in 2007, a spokeswoman says. Through a recent system enhancement, Visa can track contactless traffic by device, so it can differentiate transactions on cards from those on fobs or mobile devices. Tickets are averaging $17, indicating increasing penetration in target chains, such as convenience stores, where the technology’s speed can help merchants replace cash with cards, the network says.

Lending further impetus to the contactless trend, British Petroleum PLC plans to roll out contactless acceptance to 10,500 locations in the U.S., Visa says. The gasoline retailer already accepts contactless transactions—which replace card swipes with transmission of card information via radio waves—at 1,100 stations. Overall, some 31,000 U.S. retail locations now accept contactless payments, Visa says.

In addition, Washington Mutual Inc. announced this week it will begin testing contactless MasterCard debit cards in about a week. The bank will follow with a test of credit cards on the Visa contactless platform most likely in June. WaMu, which refuses to say how many contactless cards it will issue for the pilots, becomes the latest bank card issuer to test or commercially adopt the technology.

At the same time, MasterCard announced six vending-machine deployers are installing contactless acceptance devices from USA Technologies Inc. on their machines. The installations are part of a rollout of contactless capability to some 5,000 vending machines that MasterCard and USA Technologies announced late last year.

In adopting the payWave brand, Visa is turning away from a decision it made in 2005 when it introduced its contactless platform in the U.S. market (Digital Transactions News, March 1, 2005). At the time, the network said it would not use a brand name, preferring to identify to its program simply as Visa Contactless. Issuers in the meantime have introduced proprietary brands. JPMorgan Chase & Co., for example, uses “blink” for its program, which has issued 7 million cards.

Gains made by the contactless technology over the past two years, however, have led Visa to conclude that the time is right to introduce a brand. Indeed, Visa says Wells Fargo & Co. has already agreed to adopt the payWave brand for its contactless program. “You are seeing an evolution in our marketing strategy because we’re seeing great momentum behind the technology,” says the Visa spokeswoman. Referring to Visa Contactless, she says, “the generic term ‘contactless’ isn’t as impactful, it doesn’t give consumers direction.”

Still, the spokeswoman draws a distinction between a product brand and a technology brand. “We’re not branding a product, it’s a feature we’re naming,” she says. “Think of [payWave] as more of a marketing tool, as naming the technology.”

Visa hopes the term payWave will have more meaning for card users. It says consumers in research it conducted around the world indicated the name conveyed the method and speed of contactless transactions. Visa says it had favorable results in its Asia Pacific region, where it had introduced contactless under the “Visa Wave” brand in Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan.

Also serving as a cue to consumers is a graphic symbol—a wave pattern consisting of four curved lines increasing in length from left to right—that Visa mandated two years ago issuers place on the contactless tokens they issue to indicate the devices can be used to make payments enabled by radio waves. The same wave symbol appears as part of a generic contactless acceptance mark designed by AmEx, MasterCard, and Visa and required for the point of sale.