Visa comes up short at London 2012 Olympics
23 August, 2012
category: Contactless, NFC
Visa’s highly anticipated “contactless revolution” which was to take place at London 2012 Olympics fell up a little short, according to The Guardian.
With more than 20 million contactless cards in circulation in the UK, the card provider revealed that only 150,000 payments in the Games venues were made using wave and pay technology. Visa’s figures also show that just 15% of those who could have opted to use contactless did so.
Proving consumers still prefer cash, ATM operator Link reported that during the Olympics fortnight £6.108 billion was withdrawn from its network, an increase of 4.6% on the same two weeks in 2011.
Visa says it is still “pleased with consumers’ response to the technology” and that it “gained many useful insights that will help make contactless a commonplace payment method”. It suggests that by 2020 half of all transactions over its network will be through a mobile device.
Read the full story here.