Kerching! London Poundland stores pilot contactless payments

Shoppers in two Poundland stores in London can now pay for their purchases in under half a second, thanks to a trial of contactless payment technology.

The retailer, which sells all stock for £1, is piloting Verifone QX110 contactless terminals at all tills in its London stores in Dalston and Hammersmith.

Customers with a contactless-enabled credit or debit card need only swipe it over a reader to make a purchase of £10 or less, bypassing the need to enter a PIN code and potentially speeding up transaction and queuing times at tills.

Contactless payment technology has been around for years but has been slow to take off in the UK. A degree of momentum has been building recently, however, with Barclays pledging to replace its entire fleet of cards with contactless-enabled equivalents and estimating all its debit cards will have the tech by 2011.

However the biggest hurdle to contactless takeup among consumers is the number of retailers currently accepting the payments - without a mass rollout of readers in shops, cardholders simply can't take advantage of contactless functionality.

Poundland stores are trialling contactless payments (Photo credit: Yemisi Blake via Flickr.com under the following Creative Commons licence)

New contactless convert Poundland installed chip and PIN payment two years ago and hopes to build on an increase in overall customer spending following that deployment with its current pilot. Card payment processing tech vendor Commidea is providing the contactless terminals and a managed service, using Barclaycard as the merchant acquirer.

The retailer will use the results from the trials, which have been up and running since last month, to decide whether to roll out contactless payments across all its 250 stores in the UK in due course.