Post Office going tap-cash in 2012
Jingle of tills gradually falls silent across the land
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The UK's network of 12,000 Post Offices will start accepting contactless payment cards and thus NFC phones by October next year, making it the largest retailer to yet do so.
More than 30,000 contactless terminals will be installed to accept pay-by-tap transactions of up to the industry limit of £15. Those account for 60 per cent of the business done at the Post Office window according to Michael Birchall, payment product manager for the Post Office, who has been telling NFC Times about the project.
NFC Times notes that the previous contender for biggest deployment was Transport for London, which is planning to deploy 20,000 terminals next year to collect travel fares. Those two projects alone will nearly double the number of contactless points of sale in the UK, which currently stands at around 60,000.
Those contactless points will accept proximity cards: 15 million of which have already been issued (you might already be carrying one, check for the logo), as well as pay-by-tap telephones such as the Orange Quick Tap.
Contactless functionality is now built into most point-of-sale terminals these days, and the upgrade seems to be part of the normal equipment replacement cycle (we've asked for more details), but it is indicative of the way the industry is solving the chicken-and-egg problem with proximity payments.
With contactless being a standard feature NFC terminals will be popping up everywhere, and the cards are already in the pockets of consumers. Now the challenge is to get punters to use them. ®
COMMENTS
This will go badly sooner than later
I give it less than a year to the first large scale security problem with NFC payments. The associated industries keeps pushing for NFC while the two ISO standards that do exist for NFC make no requirements on the security side of things. As such, it is up to the implementers to incorporate proper security procedures to avoid data interception, man in the middle attacks, traffic replaying exploits etc.
Contactless-less
I got sent 2 of them, one personal debit and one for my business account.
Having checked the antenna position (via putting on into a microwave and burning the antenna through the card...) both my contactless cards have had an accident with a dremel that just happened to slice through the antenna a couple of times.
Barclays say if I want a non-contactless one, I have to have visa electron instead of a full visa debit.
Weirdly neither of them work for contactless now :)
No thanks
I do not want contactless payments at all. What I would like is a local post office to replace the three nearest to my home which have closed.
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