Spains’s CaixaBank has announced it is to re-fit 8,500 of its ATMs with contactless card readers to enable users to withdraw cash using NFC phones and cards. Will this give the NFC tech another surge or have we reached the peak usefulness of contactless? Billy Bambrough reports
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Contactless is getting its building up some serious frictionless traction. With European contactless usage through the roof banks are keen to keep up but that means investment. Though the days of the technology budget being slashed are over, many banks are still loath to part with the kind of cash wide scale upgrades require.
Card companies are big proponents of contactless as the industry as stuggled to get consumers using cards for small scale transactions but contactless could be a solution to that. Visa expects the Transport for London contactless card roll out to boost usage in the UK with Brits predicted to make 500m contactless payments between now and December 2015.
According to Chris Kangas, the head of contactless payments for Europe at MasterCard, in 2013 alone the number of MasterCard contactless transactions across Europe tripled and the volume spent on those transactions increased four times.
MasterCard recently said contactless acceptance will be standard by 2020 for European merchants accepting MasterCard and Maestro.
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By GlobalDataExisting point-of-sale terminals must be replaced by 1 January, 2020, at the latest, while new POS terminals must adhere to the new standard upon deployment from 1 January , 2016, onwards.
While the card companies want us to be paying by our contactless card, banks don’t want us to abandon cash just yet. To keep cash appealing to shoppers it has to be quick to get at and contactless ATMs appeal to banks as a way to stop the ATM queue getting out of control.
Spain’s CaixaBank has bitten the bullet and opted for fujitsu to manufacture and install a whopping 8,500 contactless bank machines over ten years, a move that the bank hopes may help move the technology to the mainstream.
Trying to get ahead of the curve and win so easy marketing on the back of Apple Pay and the Apple Watch CaixaBank is keen to play up that the NFC readers will also work with smartphones or wearables.
According to the bank contactless technology makes withdrawing cash 30% faster compared to conventional methods, not quite as much of an increase as paying by card at the till but certainly an improvement.
Chase has reported that customer time at the POS is reduced 30-40%, and American Express has reported that contactless transactions are 63% faster than cash and 53% faster than using a traditional credit card.
Dubbed Punt Groc terminals, the ATMs were custom-designed with input from CaixaBank customers and feature a dual-screen layout for transactions and support.
CaixaBank’s custom-designed Punt Groc ATM was developed with input from customers, and includes a dual screen layout — one screen to handle transactions and the other to provide customer support. The network also features advanced banknote recognition and direct check deposit technologies.
Software allows the machines to display a startup screen that is fully customized to user preferences. The customer can choose from 250 different transactions in a "style book," including personalized and controlled cash withdrawals and specification of banknote denominations dispensed. Additionally, users can select from 17 different languages, including Chinese, Russian and Arabic.
The deal is worth 500m ($671m), according to Barcelona-based CaixaBank, Spain’s third-largest by market value. CaixaBank serves about 7.5m people per month and has Europe’s third-largest cashpoint network, according to the bank.
Fujitsu Frontech’s Series 100, an ATM made in Spain that can automatically detect and remove counterfeit bills as well as process NFC transactions, recently received European Central Bank certification.
Despite the allure of being able to withdraw cash by waving a smartphone, ATMs with NFC readers have not been deployed widely, partly because of issues with interoperability.
Last year, CaixaBank terminals around the world carried out 560 million transactions a year, with cash withdrawals exceeding 32.4 billion euros ($42.2bn).
CaixaBank has a network of over 9,000 cashpoints, with more than 12.4m cards issued. The FI boasts more than 4.2m mobile banking clients and has topped 10m downloads of its applications for mobile devices.
