MasterCard: Every UK Shop Will Accept Contactless Payments By 2020

MasterCard has set out its plans to ensure contactless payments become the most acceptable form of commerce in the UK, predicting every shop in the UK will be able to accept contactless by 2020.

“From the beginning of next year, any new payment terminal that gets deployed has to accept contactless,” MasterCard’s head of emerging payments products, Mike Cowan, told attendees including TechWeekEurope at the company’s ‘Future of Payments’ event in London today.

“This is giving us a universal footprint where people will be able to use their phones to pay for stuff in this way. By 2020, every single terminal will accept contactless.”

Time To Pay?

As part of its ongoing mobile strategy, MasterCard will also work with Android Pay, Samsung Pay and Apple Pay when those services reach Europe.

And despite the latter not officially arriving in the UK until later this year, users can now use Apple Pay in certain areas, it was revealed.

The revelation came from Shasi Verma, director of customer experience at TfL, which has worked closely with MasterCard to launch contactless payments on the capital’s travel network.

Verma said his team had seen visitors from the US using their Apple Pay-enabled devices to pay for journeys on the TfL network, and predicted upon its expected launch in the UK later this year, transactions made using the service will skyrocket.

MasterCard admitted that it is ready to enable Apple Pay, as well as Android Pay, at any point as the infrastructure is already in place, with just the official go-ahead needed from Apple.

Saying that the company was “absolutely ready”, to bring Apple Pay to the UK, Cowan noted, “That’s one of the advantages of doing this on a global platform. It’s there, it’s switched on, we just have to connect the services at the back end… it takes a couple of days.”

Apple is expected to announce worldwide availability of Apple Pay to other markets at its WWDC conference in San Francisco next week.

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