BarclayCard PayTag pushes NFC mobile payments into the mainstream

Barclaycard is looking to introduce mobile payments into the mainstream with the PayTag NFC sticker.

“Today, we are offering the choice of mobile payments to millions of our customers at no additional cost to them,” said Barclaycard Consumer Europe CEO David Chan.

NFC is widely expected to make a big impact on high street payments.  While NFC technology has been talked about for sometime, it has not made its way into the majority of phones.

This may well change once the successor to the hugely popular Samsung Galaxy S2 is released in the coming weeks, but currently the technology is not widespread.

The PayTag is looking to change this by making “easy, convenient, everyday payments without the need to upgrade their current handset”.

This is because the sticker can be attached to any smartphone, or indeed any object you wish – your imagination’s the limit, because you can’t put a sticker on that.

Contactless payment terminals may not be massively widespread at the moment, but Visa is expecting a rise of 50 percent this year to 150,000.

Barclaycard’s own research has predicted that $3 billion of purchases will be made with mobile phones in the UK by 2016.

Whether customers like the idea of contactless payments, they will have it foisted on them over the coming years.