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The 300,000 multiapplication contactless cards Garanti Bank in Turkey began rolling out this week will be among the first worldwide that also carry a contactless loyalty application. That could help Garanti recruit more merchants in Turkey to accept contactless payments, says Christoph Siegelin, a director of financial services for France-based card supplier Gemalto NV, who is supplying the cards. "The experience we've seen throughout the world, whether a card is cobranded between bank and retailer (or carries a loyalty application), this definitely helps the rollout," Siegelin tells CardLine Global's sister publication Cards&Payments. "You have a retailer, since he's extremely interested, he gets (the contactless application) up and running." Siegelin pointed to the cobranded card issued by Chinatrust Commerical Bank and major health and beauty aids retailer Watson in Taiwan. The number of cards and spending on those cards ramped up quickly after it was launched in late 2005, carrying a contactless Visa payWave application. Besides MasterCard Worldwide's contactless PayPass credit application and a transit-ticketing feature, Garanti's new "Bonus Trink" cards contain the bank's Bonus loyalty program. Garanti has loaded this program onto its conventional chip-based credit cards for at least the past few years. With the new cards, consumers can tap and instantly redeem points for purchases at 20 retail chains, which is only a fraction of the 200 merchants that support conventional Bonus. Merchants can add contactless readers that take both payment and loyalty. This could help move Turkey's contactless rollout forward, says Siegelin. Also helping will be a third application on the cards, supporting the Mifare protocol. It enables cardholders to tap to pay fares for some toll-collection and ferry operators, he says. Garanti was the first major bank in Europe to roll out contactless payment when it began issuing PayPass cards in July 2006. It also issues contactless stickers supporting PayPass for mobile phones. Today there are perhaps only 4,000 merchant acceptance points where cardholders can use the PayPass devices to pay in Turkey. A few other Turkish banks also are issuing contactless cards, with Visa's payWave application onboard. A Turkish banking source recently estimated only about 5,000 merchant locations nationwide accept contactless bankcard or sticker payment of any kind. Unlike the contactless cards Garanti began issuing in 2006, which conduct magnetic-stripe transactions in contactless mode, the new cards will support the more-secure EMV standard. Merchant terminals in Turkey will accept both types of PayPass cards.
