News

Study: 250M cards will be used for contactless payments in 2014

November 20, 2013

Will consumers expect to make contactless transactions at the ATM sometime soon? A new report from Juniper Research seems to suggest that they might.

The report, "Contactless Payment Cards: Market Prospects 2013-2018," says that 250 million cards will be used for contactless payments next year, driven by migration to EMV chip-and-PIN and growing contactless POS infrastructure.

Initial growth in contactless card use will be driven by early adopter markets such as Australia, Canada, Poland and the U.K., Juniper said; in the medium term, user numbers will be boosted by substantial adoption in the U.S. following the transition to EMV.

The report found that the growth of contactless card use in the U.K. has been bolstered by ticketing as well as retail use, with more than 3.5 million London bus trips paid for via contactless payment cards since November 2012.

Still, despite recent deployments of contactless readers, such devices still account for a small minority of the total in nearly all markets.

"We’re still at a comparatively early stage in the consumer contactless journey," said report author Windsor Holden. "Awareness of — and confidence in — the technology needs to increase substantially before we move to true mass adoption."
  
Other findings from the report include:

• growth is being fueled by increased limits for contactless transactions in key markets; and
• when a wallet containing multiple contactless cards is presented at a card reader, the wrong card can be charged.

The white paper, "Contactless — Pay Your Cards Right," is available for free download at the Juniper website.

Read more about EMV.