G&D offers one of the first payment stickers to meet the specifications of the German banking industry. When the sticker is attached to a cell phone or smartphone, contactless payment becomes possible even if the device itself is not NFC-enabled. The SECCOS Mobile payment sticker is certified for the MasterCard contactless payment method PayPass. This allows bank customers worldwide to pay bills at over 350,000 PayPass locations.
Although there are around 50 NFC-enabled smartphone models now available, the number of users is still relatively low. This has left the field open for contactless payment stickers to play an important role as a bridge technology on the road to mobile payment by cell phone. G&D has developed SECCOS Mobile especially for the German market. This sticker variant runs on the SECCOS Secure Chip Card Operating System, which is the German banking industry system for smartcards. Depending on the requirements of the issuing bank, the stickers can be configured as prepaid, debit, or credit cards.
The first customers for the payment sticker are Sparda-Bank Hamburg and Donner & Reuschel. The Deutsche Genossenschafts-Verlag (DG VERLAG), system integrator and partner of cooperative banks as well as other institutes, is supplying the new technology to the banks as part of a trial conducted by the cooperative financial group.
Cardholders using the 48 x 28 millimetre G&D stickers as a MasterCard credit card can make payments at over 350,000 contactless PayPass payment terminals in 37 countries worldwide.
All transactions made this way are listed on the user’s normal credit card bill. For amounts up to 25 euros, there is no need to enter a PIN or provide a signature, cutting the transaction time by about a quarter compared to a regular card payment and by half compared to cash payments. For amounts above 25 euros, the issuing bank determines whether authentication by PIN or signature is required. In Germany, bank customers can already make payments at various PayPass locations, including Aral, Vapiano, McDonald’s, Thalia, Douglas, and Edeka. MasterCard has a PayPass Locator tool on its website, which provides users with an overview of contactless payment terminals in their vicinity.Barclaycard are already offering a similar sticker-based contactless payment scheme in the UK for devices that are not NFC-enabled.
