British Post Office Deploying Contactless Terminals
- British post offices will soon dispose of contactless terminals: some 12,000 branches should be equipped and 30,000 to 35,000 adapted POS terminals installed by October 2012.
- Considering its dominant position, this initiative will lift the British post office to the rank of largest contactless payments merchant acceptor. The notion of time saving is once again highlighted as almost 60% of the transactions in post offices represent less than 15 pounds.
- The UK contactless payment market is especially mature (See June 2011 Observatory).
- Banks and mobile operators take advantage of this maturity. In 2007 already, seven banks took part in a large scale deployment initiative: Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, Barclaycard, HSBC, NatWest and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
- These massive deployments and encouraged by high customer adoption rates (see Barclaycard’s OnePulse card with embedded payment and transportation functions); transaction limits even had to be increased in 2010 (from 10 to 15 pounds).
See March-April and November 2010 Watches