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Canada: Royal Bank of Canada and Rogers Wireless Test payWave
The six-month internal trial tested over-the-air provisioning and payment with an EMV-enabled Visa payWave application at a relatively small number of merchant locations. Royal Bank of Canada had originally wanted to distribute 5,000 phones for the trial but quickly decided that was a bad idea when it found it was taking 40 to 50 minutes to prepare each of the old Motorola SLVR NFC phones for use. It settled on about 250 phones. Users could tap at only 70 merchant locations in Toronto to pay with payWave for the trial.
Project organizers offered the mostly RBC staff who participated in the trial free airtime to get them to use the more than 3-year-old Motorola phones. But the signal faded if the users ventured outside of the Toronto area. The payWave rollout is far behind MasterCard’s PayPass in Canada, in part because of Visa’s requirement that its contactless cards in countries rolling out EMV support this more secure standard over mag-stripe. The bank has issued about 200,000 dual-interface Visa cards. It is bullish on NFC and hopes to get Canada’s Research in Motion interested in the next NFC project with RIM’s higher-end Blackberry smartphones.
Trial participants conducted more than 2,100 retail-payment transactions during the six-month trial. A post-trial survey placed user satisfaction rates at more than 70%, according to the bank.
* Trusted Service Manager: Defined loosely to include companies or other organizations securely distributing, provisioning and managing applications, generally over the air, on secure elements in NFC mobile phones; or licensing their platforms for this purpose.
N/A: Not available or not applicable.
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