CardLine Europe - Friday, November 24, 2006
MasterCard Worldwide announced yesterday the availability of a $2.99 smart card with both the conventional contact interface and a contactless interface for use with the MasterCard PayPass pay-with-a-tap system.
The card is available initially to MasterCard issuers in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. MasterCard said in a statement the price represents about a 20% discount from current prices for dual-interface chip cards and will encourage further deployments of PayPass-enabled payment cards. The card has 32 kilobytes of memory and MULTOS operating system software, and is available from Keycorp, an Australian company that develops smart card software. Keycorp says it will guarantee that price for three years. The dual-interface chip is from infineon of Germany and was recently certified by MasterCard, Keycorp says. MasterCard says there are more than 11 million PayPass and devices in use worldwide that can be used to pay with a tap at 36,000 merchant locations. Most of the deployments to date have been in the United States and Asia.
