Smart Cards

The primary reason contactless payments are gaining favor with merchants has to do with speedier transactions and other point-of-sale efficiencies, while retailers installing or planning to install the technology show little concern about its security, according to a recent survey of retail companies. Some 58% of 160 respondents to the …

MasterCard Worldwide and USA Technologies Inc., which have been working together to equip vending machines to accept card payments, including contactless transactions, have announced the first deployments in a planned 5,000-machine rollout. The two companies also said they are installing gear on the Ohio Turnpike to accept contactless tokens for …

Visa, MasterCard, and Canada's national debit network are preparing to launch a test in Ontario for a Canadian chip and PIN system that its backers hope will ultimately eliminate the magnetic stripe on all cards and replace signatures on all Visa and MasterCard credit cards. The test will start next …

Morgan Stanley's Discover Financial Services LLC payment network on Tuesday announced its certification of a contactless card reader from On Track Innovations Ltd., Discover's second such announcement in three months. But Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover still hasn't revealed its larger contactless plans. “There's nothing we can talk about right now,” a …

U.S. Bancorp reported this week that it would start testing Visa Contactless credit cards by the end of the month in the Denver area. The test will involve an undisclosed number of cardholders who would be able to use the cards equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips at about 600 …

MasterCard Worldwide and point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Holdings Inc. on Wednesday announced that the 1,600 taxicabs in Philadelphia now accept or will accept MasterCard's PayPass contactless card by year's end. The cabs will use technology from VeriFone Transportation Systems, a joint venture of VeriFone and Queens, N.Y.-based taxi-equipment manufacturer TaxiTronic …

Some 1,000 Coca-Cola vending machines in Philadelphia will be equipped with contactless-payment technology over the next four weeks, and will all be accepting contactless tokens for payment by the end of July, according to USA Technologies Inc., the Malvern, Pa.-based company whose e-Port radio-frequency device is being used with the …

For all the progress banks and merchants have made so far with contactless payments, further success is threatened by inconsistent approval criteria for components ranging from chips to readers, an expert in radio-frequency-based payment warns. That inconsistency, he says, is driving up costs and breeding frustration among vendors. “It's just …

Heartland Payment Systems Inc., a publicly held acquiring processor based in Princeton, N.J., announced today it has acquired Debitek, a provider of closed-loop stored-value systems based in Chattanooga, Tenn., from terminal maker Ingenico Corp. Terms of the transaction, which was structured as a stock purchase, were not disclosed. The deal …

Continuing its national rollout of contactless card technology, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s Chase Bank U.S.A. unit said it will begin issuing the chip-equipped cards early this month in Colorado. The announcement follows by 15 days the bank's introduction of its contactless card, which it calls “blink,” in Atlanta, the …