Contactless Payment Scheme Enables Consumers to Fill Up on Fuel and Loyalty Points

By Kevin Woodward

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A new contactless payment scheme available from On Track Innovations Ltd. enables consumers to pay for fuel at the pump without removing their payment card from their wallets.

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Dubbed EasyFuel Plus, the service means consumers do not need to swipe their credit or debit cards at the pump. A tag, which Israel-based OTI calls a moon tag, is affixed near the fuel inlet on the vehicle. Stored on the tag is a unique code associated with the consumer’s payment account, which is set up by the card issuer, OTI says. An OTI reader that slips over the fuel pump nozzle communicates with the tag to authorize transactions. EasyFuel Plus also can work with merchant loyalty points programs, OTI says.

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Currently, EasyFuel Plus is available in Europe and other international locations. OTI says plans to market it in the United States await deals with regional payment networks and issuers. OTI says it intends to work with two U.S. companies.

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Typically, the merchant pays to install EasyFuel Plus, but that may differ if a local partner uses a different business model, OTI says, such as if fuel sales revenue covers the cost. Consumers can install the moon tag—so named because of its crescent shape—or have it installed. Cost of the tag installation depends on the payment setup, OTI says.

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The moon tag incorporates a self-destruct feature to render it inoperable if it is tampered with, OTI says. Other security measures, which include data encryption and message authentication, prevent a passer-by from walking by with a scanning device to retrieve any payment credentials stored on the tag. And OTI has the capability of deactivating the tag remotely via a remote encoding process.

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Previously, EasyFuel Plus only was available to commercial vehicle owners, with more than 100,000 commercial vehicles in 43 nations using it. “With this solution we can drastically increase our market reach in addition to the commercial market also to the retail market,” says Charlotte Hambly-Nuss, managing director for OTI PetroSmart, the unit that is marketing the scheme.