Cards and technology

      The new (not that new) technology in banking cards' payment is the contactless payment.Visa, MasterCard and American Express allow customers to pay, up to an amount of 20€ for Visa and MasterCard, and 25€ for American Express, without typing their code.

       Their main argument around the technology is that,it is fast and easy (sometimes secured but that is another story).

The principle is simple. You credit card is equiped with the technology and then you just have to put it on the terminal and that’s it.

                                               

Then comes the question of security. The contactless way of payment is ot as secured as it seems. That’s one of the reason why the payment is reserved for small amounts.

MasterCard just innovate in this way with their partnership with Zwipe and just create the world’s first fingerprint authenticated contactless payment card. This card includes an integrated biometric sensor and the Zwipe secure biometric authentication technology coupled with the MasterCard’s contactless application.

With this innovation, MasterCard his a step forward from his competitors. Security is one of the most important criteria for customers.

Visa responds to MasterCard by building a partnership with Worldline to create a new technology: the Host Card Emulation which is compatible with Android 4.4. This technology is their own technology of contactless payment. This solution will be launched the first semester of 2015.

All those initiatives are just to respond to Apple. In fact, Apple has launched, with their new Iphone 6, the Apple Pay. This a contactless method of payment, using the NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, integrated in their mobile phones.. In partnership with MasterCard and Visa, it's a new opportunity and certainly a great move in the banking sector.

                                             

We can see that we are slowly moving from classic credit cards to the use of mobile phones for our payments. Is it the end of a period?