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PARIS—Société des Paiements has issued 2.5 million MasterCard-branded contactless cards since launching the product about nine months ago, Frédéric Marzurier, administrative and financial director of the financial-services subsidiary of France-based retailer Carrefour Group, said Tuesday at the Cartes & IDentification show in Paris. The initiative, among the most watched contactless projects in Europe because of Carrefour's size, enables consumers to make MasterCard PayPass debit and credit transactions at some 100 Carrefour hypermarkets, which typically combine supermarkets with department stores. Consumers also can make contactless transactions in some 700 Carrefour supermarkets and 24 Carrefour fuel stations, Marzurier said. The Carrefour contactless cards include loyalty applications that enable consumers to earn cash-back rewards and discounts on purchases. France-based Monext provides card-management and some processing services for the program. So far, 38% of Carrefour's customers who have made purchases valued at less than 25 euros (US$37.42) with the cards have used the contactless feature, Marzurier said. "That's surprising for us," he said, noting the retailer has done relatively little marketing to promote contactless payments. Carrefour expects to have deployed approximately 20,000 contactless-enabled payment terminals by June 2010, Marzurier told Cards&Payments, a CardLine Global sister publication. The retailer's "immediate motivation" for contactless was to "reduce time spent in cash lines," Marzurier said, not ruling out the possibility that Carrefour's effort with PayPass could help consumers to eventually embrace mobile payments. "Maybe we need to prepare for the future" of Near Field Communication, he said, referring to the short-range contactless-payment technology designed primarily for mobile phones. NFC has yet to see any significant rollouts, largely because of a lack of handsets and questions about the business model. Carrefour's PayPass scheme comes as France, especially the city of Nice, prepares to embrace NFC and as contactless-payment efforts in others part of Europe pick up steam. In the United Kingdom, for example, bus riders in Liverpool have started to test fare payments made with contactless debit and credit cards issued by banks. The open-loop cards have no preloaded transit applications. If successful, the test would boost efforts to bring open-loop contactless fare payments to larger transit systems, including the one in London.
