Contactless And Mobile Payments at the Olympics: Definitely Not a Medal Winner

Which was the big payments winner at the Summer Olympic Games in London, which ended Sunday? Answer: Cash, a contender that’s entered every Olympics ever held. Contactless cards and mobile devices accounted for very few payments, according to a Celent LLC analyst who visited two different Olympic venues last week.

“Sadly, cash won gold in this case, whilst I think other forms of payments simply failed to qualify for the finals,” London-based Celent senior analyst Gareth Lodge wrote in a blog post Monday.

Visa, the Games’ exclusive payments sponsor, found itself mired in controversy early on because it was the only major card brand accepted at the various Olympic sites, including just a few ATMs that accepted only Visa cards. Visa’s brand also didn’t score any points when a glitch knocked out card payments for a while at a stadium, forcing attendees to pay with cash, even though the glitch apparently wasn’t Visa’s fault.

Lodge, during his visits last week, said he closely observed Games attendees making payments. Contactless cards and mobile devices seemed notable by their absence, and suffered from a lack of promotion.

“I asked every till operator that I used, and watched the transactions in every queue I was in, and the results seemed very conclusive,” his post says. “It suggested the vast majority of payments were actually made in cash. In fact, I can recall very few payments made by card at all and I witnessed absolutely none made by contactless, let alone mobile contactless. Even the Visa ATMs were, at the times I passed them, unused.”

Lodge said he found little promotion of the contactless and mobile-payment acceptance services Visa made available. For example, while drink-dispensing vending machines accepted contactless Visa cards, human drink sellers wandered the grounds and they accepted cash only, according to Lodge, siphoning off potential contactless transactions.

“Some of the contactless use cases were simply bypassed,” he says, adding that he also saw vendors refuse to accept a number of U.S.-issued non-chip cards.

Also undercutting potential contactless volume was the lack of information about how much consumers could spend on the cards, according to Lodge. He wrote that few visitors at London’s Olympic Park apparently knew that the maximum payment on a contactless card had been raised recently to £20 (about $31). (The earlier limit was £15, according to BBC News.) Lodge said he knew the new limit because of his job, but “absolutely nobody else seemed to know this … there weren’t any signs at the tills, let alone ambassadors promoting the benefits.”

A spokesperson for Visa Europe, the European licensee of Visa Inc., told Digital Transactions News that the association could not comment Monday, but might have a comment later.

Lodge said he also found information lacking about mobile payments. He did find a booth sponsored by Samsung, the phone maker whose new Galaxy S3 device with near-field communication (NFC) technology was given to 800 athletes and Olympics decision makers. “The guides on the [Samsung] stand did an admirable job on highlighting the NFC capability as a key feature. But having teased us, that was it–they didn’t even have any way of demonstrating it.”

Lodge admitted his observations were anecdotal, but he said the Olympics were “a missed opportunity” for Visa, which apparently was more concerned with playing up British national pride.

“Instead of the industry showcasing the technology of the future, it actually showed why cash is not going to disappear anytime soon,” he wrote. “Customers don’t care about anyone’s pride when buying something-–the industry has to remember it’s about why they are making a transaction, not our feelings.”