Best Practices for Promoting Consumer Use of Contactless Payments

"Over the past five years, contactless payment has had the fastest deployment and acceptance of any emerging payments technology in recent memory," said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. "Though acceptance continues to rise, we need to look at the next steps in advancing the technology. The goal of this white paper is to outline the best practices necessary for the industry to move past the early adoption phase and prepare the payment infrastructure for the next innovation in proximity payments -- NFC-enabled mobile phones."

The Council studied the effectiveness of certain issuer and merchant activities in marketing, promotion, and consumer and employee awareness in order to determine the best practices for promoting consumer awareness and use of contactless payments. Some best practices detailed in the white paper include: providing basic information on benefits and on how and where to use the cards; targeting cardholders by demographics; creating "buzz;" identifying champions for contactless benefits; creating incentives; using multiple communication vehicles to deliver key messages; and many more.

"The white paper also includes best practices for other industry stakeholders. It is our view that all members of the ecosystem -- including acquirers, processors, vendors, payment brands, and industry associations -- need to be engaged and coordinated to play a role in making contactless payments a success," added Vanderhoof.

Participants involved in the development of this white paper and in the issuer survey included: Collis America, Cubic, Discover Financial Services, First Data Corporation, Giesecke & Devrient, IBM, INSIDE Contactless, MasterCard Worldwide, Oberthur Technologies, VeriFone, and ViVOtech.