Visa Wave: Coming to Singapore

A new contactless credit card offers a convenience of use and an alternative cashless payment to consumers in Singapore. While the current offering may appeal to a limited segment, there is still a room for improvement in the verification mechanism and leverage the appeal of the contactless credit card to other segments.

Last Thursday, United Overseas Bank (UOB) of Singapore launched the first contactless Visa Wave Credit Card in Singapore. Following the trial success in Malaysia and Taiwan during the first quarter of 2007, the launch of UOB One Card in Singapore is not surprising. Susan Williams, the Director of Stakeholder Communications Visa International Asia Pacific, shared with RFID Asia that as the end of March 2007, there are a total of 8.1 million Visa Wave cards issued by the banks in Malaysia, while in Taiwan the number is more staggering: 23.9 million cards, with more than 2,970 merchant locations that accept Visa Wave cards

Similar to the other contactless credit cards like Master Card PayPass and AmEx Express Pay, the UOB One Card only allows a small value of transaction without card holder's signature in about 300 island-wide retail outlets. UOB One Card holders can wave their cards on a reader terminal to pay for a purchase and expect the EMV-based payment system, a payment system built for chip-based transaction, to process a transaction and print a receipt within 4-6 seconds, without any card handover. Based on the study commissioned by Visa, this process is much faster than a signature-based card payment that takes an average of 25 seconds or a cash transaction that takes an average of 14 seconds.

The convenience of such contactless payment is not without a catch. Compared to non-contactless credit cards that require signature authorization or pin numbers from authorized card holders for each transaction, contactless credit card, such as UOB One Card, imposes no verification for any transaction up to $100. There is virtually no verification system in place to make sure that a person making contactless credit card payment is actually the authorized card owner. It will be easier for an unauthorized person who can get access to such contactless credit card to misuse the card. The owner of such contactless credit card can risk $100 multiplied by the number of transactions before the card reported as missing, stolen or misused in such scenario.

During the CommunicAsia 2007 in Singapore, we interviewed a few visitors about Visa Wave. The ages of the interview participants were all above 40. All of the interviewed participants said that they were excited to know about the coming of a new contactless payment technology, but they were still reluctant to use a contactless payment system. The feeling of uncertainty was the main reason of their hesitance, for example: they were still unsure whether they would be double-charged or triple-charged for waving a card several times.

The feeling of uncertainty for the consumers in Singapore is not without a grounded reason. In 1999, the consumers in Singapore saw a total of 400,000 Singapore dollars wrongly debited from their bank accounts through a crash in the country's cashless point-of-sale system. This experience has affected the adoption of any new cashless system in Singapore.

Targeting young professionals (23-34 years old), the launch of UOB One Card is a significant step for Singapore towards a cashless society, a vision backed by the Singapore Government since 1999. Compared to the current cashless payment system using magnetic strip cards, the UOB One cards will introduce a relatively new interaction style in cashless payment for the consumers in Singapore. Consumers and merchants alike using the contactless credit card system may expect a significant portion of learning and teething problems in the upcoming days and months ahead. In addition, UOB One Card may not also be as popular as its predecessors in Taiwan and Malaysia because the credit card will only be appealing to a small segment in the Singapore's aging society.