Barclaycard slaps pay-by-bonk plasters on mobes Barclaycard has launched a proximity-payment token embedded in a sticker, ideally sized for affixing to the back of a mobile phone, as a stop gap until the handsets catch up. The Barclaycard PayTag is a sticker about a third of the size of a credit card, but does not have the chip contacts or magnetic stripe. It is linked to …
This is what shops pay for banks to process transactions on average, (cash relates to the handling fee)
Cash: 1.7p per transaction
Debit card: 9.2p per transaction
Cheque: 14.8p per transaction
Credit card: 37.1p per transaction
So you see,this is much better as the banks get much more money from the shop every time you buy something using it instead of cash. FYI, it's not supposed to replace your credit cards, it's supposed to replace cash.
The BRC has said that some shops may have to increase prices to pay the extra charges. Will people who choose to pay cash get a reduced price? I doubt it...
Now... depending if you're a Muppet or not, you may start to imagine up various reasons why this new system is much more convenient for you and much better than before and therefore is a good thing that you must use.
Where did you get those numbers from? Ryanair or Easyjet?
I was speaking to the landlord and landlady at my local the other day and asked about how much they pay for Chip and PIN, they said basically nothing. There is a minimum amount of cash payment before they get charged for any transactions and they'd never managed to get over this limit. It's a small pub, but people use card payment in there all the time.
No, not the bloke down the pub, the upstanding member of the community who is the local pub landlord and a personal friend. I'm also working on a community buy out of said pub at the moment...
However, the British Retail Consortium I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw.
"I'm also working on a community buy out of said pub at the moment..."
Well, you are about to find out just how much banks charge businesses to use their payment methods, and let me tell you something....It sure as hell isn't nothing.
Good luck with your endeavor.
Re 'This is what shops pay for banks to process transactions on average'... This misses the fact that your average cash transaction size is very small compared to your average credit card transaction size. And the credit card costs are to a large degree based on the insurance provided around misuse, etc.
So, even if the ~3% fee charging is roughly the same, it's 3% of a lot less. And it'll end up being a lot less than 3% as fraud concerns around ~£10 are a lot less than ~£10,000.
Plus, there's cost-from-bank and total-cost-to-store, which are different things. Handling cash in a store has a cost - loss, theft, etc. from staff. Moody £10 notes. Incorrect change given and the aftermath of that each time. And - possibly most importantly to many stores such as McD's - customer throughout. Knocking off the ~20-30 seconds per transaction of coin and paper handling adds up quite a bit.
I wasn't all that bothered by contactless as a user, until I realised that I was carrying it as a fallback rather than a preferred form of currency (~2% cashback on credit cards has been a great incentiviser for me!), and that contactless in drive-thrus, etc, actually does remove hassle. I hate to say it, but I'm kind of converted now. However, handing over my phone through a window into which it disappears while they scan it in a Starbucks drive-thru is still a little unnerving. Even found one where the staff weren't allowed to take them as they'd dropped & broken too many shiny iThings.
"This misses the fact that your average cash transaction size is very small compared to your average credit card transaction size. And the credit card costs are to a large degree based on the insurance provided around misuse, etc."
Really? You sure about that?
Credit card fees are generally percentage based and debit card fees generally a fixed pence amount so the figures completely contradict your statement as the 37p average per transaction on credit cards does indicate a majority of small transactions rather than large ones. In fact I think the bog standard credit card payment processing fee is about 3.5% which, astoundingly enough, would make for a 35p processing fee on a £10 transaction.
Also, Barclaycard have already said that they'll be protecting end users in the same manner as credit card users RE fraud and misuse so you can bet the costs won't be too far apart once it gets going and people start losing these things or allowing them to be stolen. In fact, your entire post is just complete bollocks really. Sorry...
I wonder how thin the stickers are? would they fit on the inside of the back of my mobe case so I could pay by stealth bonk? I quite like the idea of a stealth bonk
And why limit outselves to affixing the sticker to our mobe? There are endless possiblilities and I think El Reg should open a competition for the most innovative or unusual instrument to be waved in front of the payment terminal....
Stick it to the back of your hand and invent punch-to-pay?
Stick it to your grundies and do the bump? Bump bump bu-bu-bump aw yeah?
If they're in America already, I'm surprised someone hasn't had the balls to stick one to the side of his gun and scare the shit out of a few till operators with draw-to-pay, punk.
Yes and no. It is just a fancy sticker, which is what the article said.
The point of an NFC phone (as far as the card issuers, banks, and payment schemes are concerned) is indeed to give you the ability to check transaction history and the like. The point of contactless payments in general depends who you are... for entities like Tesco it's to increase throughput, for you it's convenience, and for banks/issuers/acquirers/payment schemes pretty much the sole purpose is to displace cash transactions.
The real point of this is probably to catch the people who don't/won't have NFC phones when useful NFC apps start appearing for payments over the next few months.
... leave some of the cruft, lint, and sundry other gewgaws you carry around with you at home.
Personally I used to walk around with a rather heavy jacket and not notice the extra weight of all the stuff in the pockets, though now-a-days the jacket's much lighter and only contains the stuff I need it to. Weight is still negligible compared to the overall jacket.
I keep the coins within limits through the old passing a few coins with the paper to minimise coins returned trick. Speed? Well, you can pay quickly or you can pay slowly, doesn't seem to matter whether it's with cash or any of the "better" but so much less anonymous alternatives. I've seen the archetypical aggravating slow payer do exactly the same thing with every single one of them: Tarry and annoy. Handling any of them well are acquirable skills. The cash is easily countable. The credit on a plaster on the back of the phone, less so.
Though if you'd like to try and have a go at innovating, what about holographic, cryptographically secured plastic coins? Could be shiny, verifyable automatically, lots lighter and cheaper to make, and still physical objects without the complex and brittle technology and the long line of middlemen all salivating for their cut.
Already on the majority of cards out there? I wish!
Pay by bonk is on Barclays credit and debit and thats about it.
The other banks and issuers are still faffing around trying to decide if it is worth it, or doing the odd pilot here and there.
For this to catch on there needs to be a critical mass of users which means getting a decent percentage of cards (credit and debit) bonkable
Once people are used to bonking at the till with their cards, then maybe things like the sticky will catch on
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... sticks stuff in boxes, then photographs them with a QR code. Want to find something? Look through the (high resolution, high quality) photos, then look up the box with the matching QR tag.
Can't really do that with an RFID tag. Can't simply print radio tags (yet), either. Bit of a bummer.
Bonk the phone on the fridge to start a timer for boiling eggs? That early and I'd have to call myself to find the phone. The old timer has a more intuitive interface, though you could do much the same with that handy-dandy multitouchscreen smartphone and "an app for that". Turn off the radio on the plane? You already have the bloody thing in hand, but where do you stick the tag so that it doesn't inadvertedly turn itself off when it shouldn't?
RFID is nice for, well, sticking tags on things, sure. But does it make sense to do so? How many tasks are really bound to a place or an object in a way that makes sense to hold a reader to?
Back in the day you had barcode readers to read, say, your university card, and then read some of a number of tags printed on laminated sheets. So instead of picking your choices off a menu on the nearby handy terminal-with-keyboard, you had to leaf through numerous sheets. It struck me as a bit silly. Much of the forced applying of rfid tags strikes me as similar, except that printing barcodes takes but a simple printer, a dot-matrix or thermal printer will do. RFID tags, though, are a nice earner for the manufacturers. No wonder they want us to stick them on bloody everything, whether it makes sense or not.
The thing that I don't get, is it is called 'contactless payments' yet you make contact between the reader and sticker / card / phone / whatever....
Pay-by-bonk is much better and more accurate. If it was widely adopted as the name for this 'new' tech craze, more people might get on board
I think these stickers are they're interim solution until the tech finally catches up...
But unless taking your wallet out to "bonk" of your pocket is significantly slower, it's probably not too significant, as if you left your phone lying around, you wouldn't want anyone to see the sticker...
The benefit when NFC comes is that it would still be authenticated which would prevent anyone else using your card.
Not surprisingly, lots of comments about transaction charges. I'd love to use electronic cash this way but don't want x% of my income frittered away to the banks on cash transactions. We don't pay for transactions in hard cash because ukgov supplies it and shops absorb the cost of handling it. Now that hard cash is outdated doesn't it make sense for the government to develop ecash and keep it free. It will cost initially but may end up cheaper than printing/moving paper cash. Any downside... well they make a complete balls up of anything with software.
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