Singaplore plans major contactless deployment
03 December, 2009
category: Contactless, Financial
The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore plans to boost the number of retail locations where contactless cards can be accepted by 19,000, according to the Straits Times.
The added locations include hawker stalls, provisions shops and vending machines. As an incentive for adopting contactless payment, IDA is cutting transaction fees by up to half and waiving the rental of payment terminals for a year.
Today, Singaporeans use their 5.9 million contactless cards mainly at buses stations, with participating non-transit retailers numbering only 5,000. Consequently, only 5 percent of ez-link card transactions and 20 per cent of Nets’ FlashPay card transactions take place in non-transit areas.
The initiative aims to right this imbalance, raising the number of contactless card transactions to an expected 94 million a year by 2011. Deployment is expected to cost $16 million.
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