First Data Go-Tag On Display for Dems

First Data made a Go of its new “sticker”-based payment technology—Go-Tag—at last week’s Democratic National Convention in Denver. The payment vendor, which has been testing the Near Field Communications-enabled chip form factor for a year, provided thousands of Go-Tag lapel pins for convention delegates for able to use for purchases of to $10 in concession stand purchases at the Pepsi Center.
ID tags and cards have been the test-phase devices for Go-Tag technology, but the goal is to plaster the stickers onto cell phones, as is being done currently by digital wallet company Mobile Dish Candy with its Blaze Mobile platform.
Many of the expectations behind stickers have been for their use as an interim payment form that would encourage customer use (plus merchant terminal investments) while banks, card companies, vendors, carriers and phone manufacturers build and carry out their alliances for embedded phones.
We could see a rash of these “outside the box” NFC chip programs very shortly. Earlier this year, smartcard chip vendor INSIDE Contactless introduced a new product, its MicroPass 4300, which is suitable for a sticker placement. The French company also landed deals with six issuers to begin engineering a secure and aesthetically acceptable sticker format for mobile phones, geared toward prepaid account usage.