Two National Football League teams have agreed to accept MasterCard International's PayPass card at their stadiums starting this year.
MBNA Corp. will provide PayPass-enabled cards to interested holders of its credit cards cobranded with the Seattle Seahawks and the Baltimore Ravens, MasterCard said last week.
The Purchase, N.Y., company has promoted the contactless cards since it began testing the technology in Orlando in 2003. More merchants now accept PayPass and other similar systems.
Last year McDonald's Corp. said it would install PayPass readers at all its U.S. restaurants that accept credit cards. And the drugstore chain CVS Corp. plans to install readers for a contactless product, ExpressPay, from American Express Co.
PayPass looks like an ordinary magnetic-stripe credit card but uses radio waves to transmit information when the holder taps the card on the face of a specially outfitted terminal.
O.B. Rawls, the president of Hypercom North America, a division of Hypercom Corp., which makes and sells contactless terminals, said "multilane" retailers - fast-food outlets, grocery stores, and "big-box retailers" - are showing a lot of interest in the technology.
"Everyone we talk to is discussing it," Mr. Rawls said. "They are all looking at how to move people through the lines faster."
ABI Research of Oyster Bay, N.Y., said in a report last week that there would be "a sharp increase in the number of contactless payment opportunities for consumers" this year.
MasterCard said JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., and MBNA participated in the Orlando pilot test and issued 16,000 cards. JPMorgan Chase issued at least another 5,000 cards to its New York employees, MasterCard said.
None of the companies would say how many cards they have issued beyond that.
