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Orange and Barclaycard transform buying on Britain’s high-streets
The UK’s first contactless mobile phone payments service allows consumers to make purchases on the high street using their mobile phone.
Customers can make purchases £15 and under nationwide by simply tapping their Quick Tap mobile handset against a contactless reader at over 50,000 stores.
Using Barclaycard’s contactless payment technology, customers will be able to pay for items anywhere they see the contactless payments symbol, including shops and cafes like Pret A Manger, EAT and Subway
Quick Tap will use a secure SIM-based approach to mobile payments, providing a single point of contact for customer care as well as ensuring enhanced payment security, according to Orange.
The landmark launch means that in addition to using contactless cards or chip and PIN, consumers can simply tap their mobile phone on a contactless reader at tills in over 50,000 stores to make purchases £15 and under.
The service will be available to Orange customers who use a ‘Quick Tap’ enabled handset, such as the Samsung Tocco Lite.
Barclaycard is providing Orange customers with £10 cash added to their account upon activation, and 10% cash back on all Quick Tap purchases made in the first three months.
Commenting on the announcement, David Chan, CEO of Barclaycard Consumer Europe, said: “This is the first time that customers can use their mobile to pay for goods and services in shops across the UK rather than using cards or cash. They’ll be able to do this, safe in the knowledge that this is a secure technology brought to them by the biggest names in payments and mobile technology.”
Howard Berg, senior vice president, Gemalto UK & Ireland which worked on the roll out of the Quick Tap project, said: “The rollout of mobile contactless payments marks a major milestone in technology and how it is enhancing peoples’ lives and changing long-standing consumer habits. Consumer organisations have made great strides in making this a reality – consumers are already using their mobile phone for mobile banking, transfer, emails so this is the natural next step. NFC technology turns the mobile phone into an extremely fast, secure and convenient means of payment. As users soak up the benefits of this new payment means, we could expect a wide scale roll out of the service by other banks and operators.
“Understandably, security remains a key concern for users, but using mobile devices for NFC payments brings two major additional advantages in this respect. Firstly, the payment user interface application running on the phone can - at the issuer’s discretion – provide the ability to request for a PIN code to be entered before any payment is possible, even for small amounts.
“Secondly, if the mobile is lost or stolen, the NFC payment issuer via the Trusted Service Manager, can immediately remotely ‘lock’ or even delete the contactless payment application from the mobile. This is an exciting time for UK consumers.”
