An article relating to this blog post on Finextra:
Barclays to move to contactless debit as standard
The UK's Barclays Bank says that from March most Barclays debit cards that are issued or reissued will have contactless technology built in as standard.
See article
Interesting development by Barclays in adding contactless technology to all their debit cards.
I wonder whether they are planning to offer people the option to opt out of the card type, i.e. have a debit card without the contactless capability...? I think that's the choice I would like to make at this point until I understood how safe it was on the
one hand and what data I was going to get about the individual transactions I might make in due course on the other. As I mentioned in an earlier blog (Deliver My Statement In A Wheelbarrow), I'd be wanting full disclosure of all transactions and therefore
I'd expect my statement to grow significantly in length (and therefore pages) over time. Does this make sense from either a cost or enviromental perspective?
I know this is a bit irrational but I still have this image in my mind of going shopping (remember shopping? That activity we all did before the recession...) on a Saturday and getting my statement at the end of the following week to find I inadvertently
'spent' a shed load of money as I walked past tills. The lack of any overt signal from me that the transaction is valid still worries me. In my old capacity as a card product manager, I would also be worried at what contactless is going to do to my fraud
and other dispute losses, as I understand that the issuer will take the losses resulting from disputes.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, especially as I still don't see how this technology will get rid of cash for the forseeable future, and if it doesn't do that, what is the capability for?