Carrefour, World’s Second Largest Retailer, Makes Major Contactless Endorsement
Written by Evan SchumanAlthough contactless payment is going through a tough time in the U.S. these days, its global efforts got a huge boost this month. Europe’s largest chain—French grocery giant Carrefour—announced the purchase of 12,000 EMV contactless PIN pads, with immediate plans to deploy the pads “at 210 of its French hypermarkets, as well as at all of Carrefour’s petrol stations in France.” The world’s second-largest retailer’s latest contactless deployment, which started in October 2009 but wasn’t announced until last Thursday (Feb. 4), is using readers from Hypercom, the chain said. The vendor would only describe Carrefour’s investment as “multi-million dollar.”
Domestically, contactless is having problems, with Best Buy kicking out Visa’s contactless program and Discover having its own technical problems with contactless . Even many of the U.S. chains that have deployed contactless have done so very unenthusiastically, including Home Depot and Subway.
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February 11th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Contactless payment just doesn’t do anything for me as a consumer. The difference between waving my card and swiping my card is negligible. Now from a retailer’s perspective I imagine fraud can be significantly reduced, but does the savings outweigh the required investment? On the other hand, I think near-field technology in mobile phones can be leveraged in lots of places in the store, not just the checkout stand. That will be much more interesting.