Contactless Payments On a Sticker

I have been working on a couple of projects over the last year where contactless payment devices have been a current or future requirement. Therefore a headline caught my eye today on Finextra regarding CitiBank's rollout of a sticker based contactless payment device. The idea is that CitiBank customers attach the sticker to the back of their mobile phone and tap it at any MasterCard PayPass terminal. The sticker uses RFID technology to transmit card information to the PayPass terminal and the customer completes the transaction by tapping on the PayPass terminal. The sticker is tied to a prepaid account, presumably with a relatively low top up amount.

The sticker technology was developed by a company called BlazeMobile(http://www.blazemobile.com/). Various versions of contactless payment technology have existed for years, but this sticker based version is a simple but very smart innovation. It will be interesting to see if it takes off and with 50 million Mastercard PayPass devices in use worldwide (not to mention the competing alternative from Visa) hopefully we will see it soon in Ireland too.

The original Fixextra article can be found at: http://www.finextra.com/News/Fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=21481