Crédit Agricole Selects Gemalto for its Contactless Offer
- The Crédit Agricole group has confirmed its investment in developing innovative payment solutions for all its customers. The bank has just signed a partnership with Gemalto to deploy contactless EMV cards.
- Crédit Agricole should soon propose contactless cards to all its customers, for small-amount transactions in the first place.
- Designed by Gemalto, the Clarista system will enable payments below 20 euros through simple presentation of the card in front of the adapted reader. Transactions for higher amounts will be PIN-secured.
- Gemalto released this information and Crédit Agricole explains this strategic decision should provide for the issue of cash management in addition to providing new services to the customers.
- Cash is especially used in micro-payment contexts and few alternative solutions have hardly even imposed themselves. Cash management raises two issues for banks: respectively, processing cost and security level.
- Designers of dematerialised processing management solutions have been working to take shares in this market. Yet, considering Moneo’s sluggish development, French banking institutions wish to develop their own offers.
- Contactless payment has been spreading fast throughout Europe last year and contactless cards are particularly well implanted in the UK where they are backed by soon to come London 2012 Olympics for instance.