Contactless payment in the news.

The next couple of years are going to be big for contactless payment solutions in the retail sector. Recently both Barclaycard and STarbucks have annouced major advances in contactless payment technologies.

Starbucks customer have long been able to use their prepaid starbucks card to buy coffee, but they have linked up with mFoundry and iPhone to allow customers to make contactless mobile payments - yup - use your mobile phone to buy coffee! The advantages for the customer are simple - easier payments and faster checkouts - mind you, they will still take an age to make coffee, and you'll still be stuck behind the man buying sixteen of the most complicated drinks for his entire office!

THe advances that mobile contactless payment brings to Starbucks is huge - the combination of mobile payments with mobile marketing means that Starbucks will be able to target their marketing to specific customers. Specially offers can be tailored to the individual and sent to their phones. Starbucks will be able to send these offers in a time critical way - just before the customer habitually buys coffee!

Starbucks EPOS and retail management system programmers are going to have a lot of fun working out ways to exploit the vast wave of customer data coming their way!

Starbucks has a massive regular customer base, and if this volume of people start getting comfortable with mobile and contactless payments on a daily basis, it will cause a knock on effect in the whole retail sector - especially in the low value transaction area - so be sure not to miss out on the contactless and mobile payment revolution!

At a recent charity event at the OXO tower, Barclaycard have been showing off their new Contactless payment card. Barclaycard have been quite to push the advantage for charities - it is much easier to make donations with a contactless or mobile payment solution rather than have people looking for change in their pockets.