ANZ plans to trial again the ability for its customers to use phones instead of cash or cards to pay shopkeepers.
The bank will conduct a limited test of near-field communications (NFC) technology using Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones with 25 ANZ staff.
The smartphones will rely on the secure elements embedded in Optus SIM cards to provide access to individual payments of $100, or more expensive payments with PIN code authorisation.
Last year, ANZ launched a similar contactless payments trial using iPhones — which do not have native NFC capabilties — with a third-party case and micro SD cards for secure elements.
Sam Qubrosi, ANZ’s head of product management and unsecured lending, told our sister site iTnews last May that participants had responded positively to the four-week trial.
But ANZ head of payments John Collins told iTnews today that the trial had failed based on customers' aversion to add-on devices.
"Now that iPhone 5 has been announced and it doesn't have native NFC, we will revisit that research and ask customers whether that view has changed," he said.
He said initial use of NFC technology would still require agreements with telcos, due to an inability to access the secure elements embedded in the NFC chip on Android handsets themselves.
"The analogy that we're using is that in the same the banking community went from pinstripe to contact EMV cards to contactless EMV cards, the telco needs to upgrade their SIM from contact to contactless SIM cards," he said.
"The long-run solution needs to be telco-agnostic. Ultimately, in the same way you do today, you don't go and buy a bunch of different wallets and say 'I can only use this wallet in this shop'."
This is an shortened version of an article published by iTnews. Read the full version here.
