NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight - The heads of the two largest payments networks in the U.S., Visa and Mastercard, predict strong growth for contactless payments in the U.S., with Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga noting that 70% of U.S. Mastercard-branded cards in the U.S. are coming up for reissue over the next 12 to 14 months, and most of these cards will be issued with a contactless interface. A large number of Visa-branded cards will be reissued with a contactless interface during that period, as well.
Both Visa CEO Al Kelly and Mastercard’s Banga, talking to financial analysts over the past couple of days following the release of their respective quarterly earnings report, appeared to be speaking from the same script on contactless. Both said that roughly one-third of domestic transactions from cards carrying their brands are now contactless globally. And both pointed to the open-loop fare payments service that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York launched last May as helping to promote further growth of contactless payment in the U.S.
Contactless transactions, including those with Apple Pay, Google Pay and the other Pays wallets, is still in the single digits of all domestic card payments in the U.S. If figures from the U.S. are excluded, Visa said last April that contactless transactions for cards carrying its brand would account for nearly 50% of Visa card transactions globally, as NFC Times reported. Kelly in speaking to analysts yesterday, noted that in the past year, Visa doubled the number of countries, where face-to-face transactions make up at least two-thirds of total transactions.He didn’t mention the names of the countries, but they include Australia and Poland.
