The UK continues to expand its rollout of contactless, with Starbucks completing its deployment of contactless point-of-sale terminals at 550 coffee shops nationwide.
The Starbucks deployment follows completion by Marks & Spencer, one of the UK’s largest retailers, of the rollout of contactless payment at 644 of its UK stores. McDonald’s restaurants and retail pharmacy Boots are also among tier-one merchants in the UK supporting contactless open-loop payments, along with the 11,000-branch UK Post Office and Transport for London on more than 8,000 buses.
There are now more than 250,000 contactless POS terminals deployed in the UK, according to Visa Europe, which announced the completion of the Starbucks rollout Monday. That is the most in Europe and is expected to eventually help clear the way for launch of mobile NFC payments in the country. UK NFC commercial launches have generally been delayed.
Starbucks now offers its bar code-based, closed-loop mobile-payment service in the UK, following rollout of the service in the U.S.
Visa Europe clearly wants to focus attention on the progress of payWave, and besides Monday's announcement of completion of the Starbucks UK rollout, last month the payment scheme noted that Marks & Spencer had also finished its planned deployment.
Visa is also trumpeting the greater use of contactless in the UK and in Europe.
According to updated figures mentioned by Visa Europe’s Jon White, head of marketing, mobile strategic alliances, at a conference Tuesday, there are a total of more than 800,000 contactless point-of-sale terminals spread across 15 countries and 80 acquiring banks in Europe. Poland and Spain are also sizable contactless-payment hotspots in Europe.
Nearly all of the contactless POS terminals accept both MasterCard Worldwide PayPass and Visa payWave, with a much smaller portion of them also taking ExpressPay from American Express, as well.
There are also 59 million cards supporting payWave on issue throughout Europe, nearly half of them in the UK, according to Visa.
Those cards are being used more often by consumers, Visa noted. The company said that contactless transactions increased by 46% between December 2012 and March 2013 and are up by five times from a year ago in Europe, according to White.
In the UK, Visa said last month that Marks & Spencer reported that 14% of its card transactions under £20 (US$30.97) are contactless. At stores with higher adoption rates, such as the chain’s Finsbury Pavement location in London, as many as one in three purchases under £20 are contactless. Marks and Spencer stores see 230,000 contactless transactions a week, or about one million every month, Visa said last month.
Transport for London introduced open-loop fare collection in December on the 8,500 buses it oversees, accepting payWave, PayPass and ExpressPay, along with its closed-loop Oyster card on the buses.
The transit authority has recorded about 2 million contactless bank card transactions since opening the terminals to open-loop fare collection, said Visa. White, who formerly worked at Transport for London, said the transit authority plans to expand its open-loop payment program to the London Underground and other modes of transport by next January.
UK consumers don’t have to enter a PIN for purchases under £20 if they use a contactless bank card.
The completion of the rollout of contactless at Starbucks follows a pilot at select UK Starbucks locations, announced in May 2011.