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Contactless payment systems are credit cards, key fobs, smartcards or other devices which use RFID for making secure payments. The embedded chip and antenna enable consumers to wave their card or fob over a reader at the point of sale. Some suppliers claim that transactions can be almost twice as fast as a conventional cash, credit, or debit card purchase. Because no signature is typically required for purchases under US$25, some research indicates that consumers are likely to spend more money due to the ease of small transactions.

With a potential global market value of nearly $1 trillion in payments, this is not an area that cards issuers, acquirers or schemes can afford to ignore. The US has the greatest potential in terms of contactless payments, with low value cash transactions of $297 billion per year at present. The global contactless opportunity is $963 billion per year.
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Contactless payment phones or Near Field Communications (NFC) enabled phones will become increasingly common, and a recent report highlights the following:

• Global mobile subscribers with NFC phones will reach 700m by 2013
• The market is currently dominated by FeliCa-enabled phones on the networks of NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank in Japan, where we estimate about 50m FeliCa-enabled phones have been shipped to date.
• North America, Western Europe and Far East & China will be the leading regions by 2013, with each region having annual shipments in excess of 25% of total NFC phone shipments.
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Opportunities lie in mobile software for contactless payment and contactless point of sale readers