A new range of contactless stickers, designed to be attached to the back of a mobile phone, have been certified by MasterCard and Discover Financial Services.
The stickers, developed by Inside Contactless and manufactured in the US by CPI Card Group, feature a special adhesive backing — which enables them to be removed and reapplied multiple times without losing their grip — and a new shielding design aimed at reducing interference between the sticker’s chip and antenna and the host mobile phone’s signals and metallic materials.
“CPI sees a bright future for contactless mobile payment stickers and has put in place a commercial manufacturing operation with the industrial capacity to quickly satisfy a multi-million unit market,” says Tom Waters, vice president of sales and marketing at CPI Card Group.
“CPI deployed more contactless payment cards last year than any other company in the market, and now we are firmly in the mobile payment arena with an enhanced sticker product that brings greater choice to card issuers,” he added. “With CPI’s efficient and highly scalable manufacturing and pre-personalization systems, we believe we can offer this product at very competitive price levels.”
Inside’s Charles Walton sees the stickers as a critical step on the way to NFC: “These stickers have the potential to transform the mobile payment market in the US by enabling anyone to make PayPass payments with their mobile phone, thus setting the stage to ultimately achieve fully integrated NFC payment and other applications,” says Walton.
The MasterCard PayPass certified stickers use Inside Contactless’ MicroPass 4003 contactless payment processor while the Discover Zip version uses the MicroPass 4002, the same technology which was used in Discover’s pilot trial of mobile contactless stickers at its offices in Illinois and Utah last year.
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