Extension of Nice Pilot Tests to Other French Towns
- Mobile contactless payment should be extended to other French towns than Nice: for instance, Marseille and Strasbourg in 2011 and, in 2012, Paris.
- Mobile payment partner and sponsor, Visa Europe, praised the success of Nice experimentation and intends to massively deploy these solutions on a worldwide scale.
- During these tests, 200,000 contactless cards and 3,000 mobile phones embedding NFC technology were distributed. 1,500 merchants were equipped with adapted terminals and 2,800 contactless transactions were performed.
- Visa Europe, as well as the telecom operators and terminal manufacturers are satisfied with the results of these tests, but the banking sector admits that this success is only partial: the number of transactions is in fact rather low. Mobile and card contactless payment is technically operational; this technology associated with a multiservice offer and the collaboration between different services providers is functional. Nevertheless, massive and quick deployment of mobile payment would imply that:
- payment terminals be changed (a large investment for merchants),
- new generation NFC enabled mobile phones be proposed (the consumer must either buy an NFC mobile phones or opt for alternative means to make it NFC compatible: stickers, microSD cards, etc.).
- Mobile and contactless payments are major development lines supported by card network Visa.
See Players’ Strategies “M-commerce: Visa Enters Square Board”.