Radio Frequency Technology

Ritz Camera Centers Inc., which last week announced it would adopt MasterCard's PayPass contactless card program chainwide, says it hopes to use the technology to hasten photo-finishing customers through the checkout process. “They're in the stores two or three time a week, and they want the service to be kind …

MasterCard International and Visa International, which are now both offering platforms in the U.S. for contactless card transactions based on radio-frequency identification technology, have agreed on a common communications protocol and on testing requirements for the technology. The agreement should mean that payment devices branded by one of the associations …

Visa USA's decision to enter the contactless payment market represents a major change in strategy at the card association, which up to now had experimented with radio-frequency-based payment overseas but had not seen the U.S. as ripe for the technology. Now, with its announcement last week that it had created …

This will be a year of substantial deployment for contactless payments based on radio-wave technology as card networks roll out programs and merchants find the systems perform as promised, a new research study says. “Merchants are finding it works,” says Erik Michielsen, director for RFID and ubiquitous networks at ABI …

MasterCard International's PayPass contactless payment technology will be deployed at 900 points of sale for concessions inside two stadiums starting with the 2005 National Football League preseason, the card company announced today. Interest among sports stadiums in PayPass, which replaces conventional card swipes with radio signals that carry card-account data …

Sheetz Inc. will install MasterCard International's PayPass tap-and-go payment system in all 305 of its stores by March 1, the two companies have announced. Sheetz, a top-10 operator of convenience stores based in Altoona, Pa., says it hopes the radio-frequency-based system will add to customer convenience by cutting transaction time …

It has been an eventful week for American Express Co. Today the company announced that Woonsocket, R.I.-based drugstore chain CVS Corp. has agreed to serve as the first national merchant to accept ExpressPay, an AmEx system that relies on radio waves rather than card swipes to authorize transactions. This news …

A startup company says it is probably 12 to 18 months away from piloting a contactless payment card that will incorporate both chip-based radio-frequency identification and biometric authentication technology. Up to now, RFID-based payment pilots and programs have not included PINs or any other means of authenticating users. But 2-year-old …

MasterCard International announced today it will launch pilots of its PayPass electronic payment system on mobile phones from Motorola Inc. The Purchase, N.Y.-based card company says the pilots will get under way at a “variety” of unspecified locations in the U.S by the end of the year. The Motorola phones …

Dexit Inc., a Toronto-based processor of stored-value transactions using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, is expanding nationally in Canada and will begin processing transactions in other parts of the world next year?but not in the U.S. any time soon. Dexit, which allows consumers to use chip-embedded keychain “tags” to tap accounts …