IMGCAP(1)]
Two North American banks plan to begin testing contactless chip technology from Inside Contactless that enables participants to use cards to pay for services and do related tasks such as access control and loyalty applications. The tests should begin this month and last no more than three months, Jérôme Monnot, software product manger for the France-based contactless technology vendor, told CardLine sister publication CardLine Global at the Cartes & Identification show in Paris this week. Monnot declined to name the banks, which he described as "major." The tests involve Inside's MicroPass technology. The cards will carry 8 kilobytes of memory. In general, the technology would enable a consumer to tap the card against a reader at an airport to buy a ticket, with the chip communicating with the reader about a frequent flyer's preferred routes and seats. The flyer would tap the card again to pay for the ticket. Consumers could use the same technology to buy their favorite types of coffee in a café, for instance, or to reload transit passes onto their cards before boarding busses, or to access office buildings and eat in corporate cafes, Monnot says. One of the banks will conduct the test in a corporate setting while the other will conduct a test in a campus setting, he says. Probably more important than testing the technology—which, in a demonstration during the Cartes show, used readers from HID Global and Cubic Corp., both based in the United States—is learning how the banks can work with the other organizations to personalize and manage the card programs, Monnot says. "How do [they] work together to deploy these services?" Monnot asks.
