NFC Times Exclusive – Three years ago, in June of 2013, MasterCard announced it would “deploy a target” of 410,000 MasterCard PayPass-enabled point-of-sale terminals, to be rolled out “throughout Japan over the next three years.”
Three years later, in June of 2016, market observers tell NFC Times they believe there are fewer than 1,000 POS terminals supporting MasterCard Contactless or any other international contactless technology for bank cards–about the same number of terminals as MasterCard started with three years earlier.
MasterCard had announced the target by promising that four of Japan’s major acquirers: Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS, Sumitomo Mitsui Card, Orient Corp. and UC Card, would help deploy the terminals. It was at a time, in 2013, when Japan’s three major telcos had already started rolling out hybrid smartphones that could support Japan’s dominant proprietary contactless technology, FeliCa, along with NFC technology that complies with the international ISO/IEC 14443 standard. The latter is used for most contactless bank cards and bank applications on NFC phones globally.
