Chase Says Its New Blink Card Will March Through Atlanta First

Atlanta is where J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. will begin its rollout of contactless cards, starting June 1, the bank announced today.

Chase, which said last week it would begin issuing the chip-equipped cards this summer in a region-by-region rollout (Digital Transactions News, May 19), says almost 1 million of the new, so-called blink cards will initially be accepted at some 400 Atlanta merchant locations, including stores in the Walgreen Co. pharmacy chain. Other merchants, which Chase did not name, will include movie theaters, convenience stores, and quick-service restaurants.

Such chains as movie emporium Regal Entertainment Group, c-store giant 7-Eleven Inc., and McDonald’s Corp. have previously announced they would accept contactless cards chainwide. The roster of accepting merchants “is expected to grow steadily throughout the year,” the bank said in a statement it released today.

Chase plans to support the move into Atlanta with an integrated marketing campaign featuring ads on TV, radio, billboards, and in local newspapers. The ads will exhort cardholders to “blink a drink” or “blink a movie,” with the card’s brand name referring to the sound the card makes when its embedded chip makes radio contact with point-of-sale receivers. “Metro Atlanta is a progressive, innovative, and trend-setting market, which makes it an excellent place to launch the new Chase cards with blink,” said Carter Franke, chief marketing officer at Chase Card Services, in a statement.

Veterans of the electronic payment business will recall that Atlanta was where Visa USA conducted a well-publicized U.S. test of smart cards nine years ago, tying the test into the 1996 Olympic Games held in that city. The new cards will work on contactless platforms that have been established by MasterCard International and Visa USA. MasterCard calls its program PayPass. Visa, which only entered the contactless market in the U.S. earlier this year, has deliberately avoided branding its program, referring to it only as Visa contactless (Digital Transactions News, March 1).

Separately, Arthur Blank & Co. Inc., a card manufacturer based in Boston, says it has secured an agreement with Infineon Technologies North America under which the chipmaker will supply radio-frequency-identification chips. RFID is the technology underlying contactless cards. Relying on an inlay consisting of a chip and an antenna, a contactless card transmits card-account data to a reader linked to point-of-sale device, replacing the conventional card swipe. Cardholders need only tap or wave their cards in close proximity to the reader to start the transaction.

The bank card networks, as well as American Express Co., which has been rolling out an RFID platform called ExpressPay that operates on the same standard, say contactless payments are often faster than cash transactions.