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Lessons from Down Under
automatically is loaded onto the Sea Eagles card.
“Members have an emotional connection to their clubs, and by offering a team-branded Visa prepaid card that also [enables them] to earn rewards is another way for clubs to provide additional benefits to their members,” Colbert says. “We also discovered that members were using their card for discretionary spending and budget- ing, and they felt safer when making purchases online.”
Australia is leading the way from an innovation perspective, says i2c’s Salmon. “Whether it’s multicurrency wallets, mobile, contactless, tokeni- zation or multicard programs, it all comes down to enhancing the customer’s end-to-end experience around payments.”
Poised for Mobile Takeoff
As the world’s largest contactless market in terms of terminal pene- tration and transaction volume, Australia is poised for a mobile payment revolution. PayPal and Visa released separate studies indicating a trend that Australians want to use their phones as a payment device. PayPal’s research indicates that 33 percent of Aus- tralians have bought products or services using a smartphone,
and Visa’s report has that figure 10 percentage points higher
at 43 percent.
Some banks also have introduced mobile phone applications enabling their customers to make contactless
transactions from wallets linked to their payment cards using NFC tech- nology embedded in the phones
or with NFC stickers attached to handsets. What’s more, Apple has been trying to make inroads with Apple Pay since earlier this year, according to reports.
With Visa payWave already account- ing for six in 10 face-to-face Visa transactions, Australia is primed for mass adoption of mobile payments, according to Walls. “Once consum- ers have made a contactless pay- ment, they are on the evolutionary path to mobile payments,” he explains. “There already are mobile payment technologies available in the country that are gaining traction with consumers.”
The proliferation of contactless ac- ceptance devices, including fixed line terminals, wireless acceptance
devices linked to a base station, such as in restaurants, or truly mobile devices, such as in taxis, paves the way for NFC-based mobile payments from a hand- set, according to a 2014 study from the Australian Payments Clearing Association.
More than half of Australians say they would use contactless pay- ments everywhere if more retailers were equipped with the technology, according to MasterCard research. “At the moment, the widespread adoption of contactless payments has meant that most consumers are happy with using their cards to tap-and-go,” explains MasterCard’s Cartwright. “However, we believe this level of comfort with contact- less payments will help to drive adoption of mobile payments
in the future, as more options are launched.”
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