Coca-Cola To Deploy Vending Machines That Accept PayWave

Coca-Cola Bottling Co. plans to deploy vending machines that accept Visa payWave cards in the Olympic Village during the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games that open Feb. 12 in Vancouver British Columbia, giving contactless payment a worldwide stage to display its capabilities.
The company will deploy 270 vending machines in the Olympic Village, and it will deploy 280 others throughout Canada in high-traffic areas during the Olympic Games, says Mike Bradley,  head of product for Visa Canada. The games are scheduled to end Feb. 28.
The Olympics are a test for the world’s best athletes, who compete against each other. But Visa payWave will not face competition from MasterCard PayPass, American Express Express Pay or Discover Financial’s Zip contactless cards because Visa is the games’ payments sponsor, and only Visa cards will be accepted inside the Olympic Village, Bradley says.
The games, however, will provide a test for the vending machines, including whether payWave will increase sales and whether consumers are willing to use payment cards in different form factors, Bradley says.
Jeff Kirkland, Coca Cola vice president of on-premise sales operations, believes if consumers show a liking for the machines, it could lead to additional deployments. “We anticipate that the rollout of the Visa payWave-enabled Coca-Cola vending machines will lead to more opportunities to apply this technology,” he wrote in an e-mail message. Coca-Cola is distributing a PayWave fob resembling a Coke bottle to athletes, coaches and trainers. They attach the fob to their key chains and use the fob to purchase drinks from the vending machines inside the Olympic Villages, which will be in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia.
Royal Bank of Canada has issued a couple hundred thousand payWave credit cards during the past year,  says Anne Koski,  the Toronto-based bank’s head of payments innovation. “It’s been a slow ramp up,” she says. “We’re waiting to see if there is interest in the marketplace. It is like the chicken and egg. Merchants won’t deploy payment terminals to accept contactless cards until they know consumers use the cards, and issuers won’t issue contactless cards until they know there are terminals that accept them.”
Royal Bank of Canada is the Winter Olympics bank sponsor.
PayWave cards use radio frequency identification technology to transit data from a chip in the card to a similar chip in a payment terminal. Cardholders tap with their payWave card on a reader deployed inside the vending machine above the coin slot.