Bank of Ireland is rolling out what it claims is the first contactless Visa debit card from an Irish bank.
The bank has a million Visa debit cardholders and will be sending out new, contactless cards equipped with Near Field Communication technology to those customers later this year. The new cards will allow customers to pay for purchases of up to 15 Euros ($21.48) in less than one second by holding their payment card over a reader at a retail outlet.
Irish citizens are avid debit card users, according to the bank. Ireland has the highest per capita ATM usage in Europe and last year consumers withdrew about €5,000 ($71.60) each from ATMs.
But Irish consumers and businesses also remain one of the highest users in Europe of checks. The Irish government is looking to reduce cash and paper-based transactions and promote electronic transactions.
Bank of Ireland is the country’s largest bank so the Visa contactless rollout will have a “material impact” on the market and a greater effect than in UK because there are fewer banks in Ireland, Matt Simester, managing director at Auriemma Consulting Group in London, tells PaymentsSource.
Visa Europe and Bank of Ireland will be able to apply lessons learned from the UK rollout, such as making sure merchants are ready to accept contactless payments and promoting the technology more at the point of sale, Simester says. “Contactless is still not embedded in the national consumer consciousness in the UK,” says Simester. “It is slow to become a day-to-day feature, but you have to start somewhere.”
Contactless payment technology in the UK so far was more “pushed by the banks than pulled by the retailers,” says Simester, but the UK market is making progress. McDonald’s Corp. early this year announced plans to accept contactless payments at 1,200 locations in UK (
Barclaycard also has been promoting the technology in TV ads (
Bank of Ireland did not respond to inquiries regarding how it will market the contactless cards and what retailers will accept the payments.
Contactless cards have been “firmly embraced” in Europe with over 20 million cards in circulation, Quentin Teggin, Bank of Ireland head of consumer segments, noted in a press release. Visa Europe expects the number of Visa contactless cards in the U.K. to increase from 13 to 20 million by the end of 2011, Visa Europe said in the release.
Meanwhile, Visa Europe said in the release that weekly spending on contactless cards has doubled in the last six months, and is expected to more than double again by the year-end.
“From the end of this year, counting coins to pay for items such as fast-food, newspapers or coffee will be history for Bank of Ireland’s customers who choose to embrace this new technology,” Teggin said in the release.
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