Philly To Get RFID-enabled Vending Machines

By Mary Catherine O'Connor

June 28, 2006—If you're in the Philadelphia metro area this summer, you're thirsty and you happen to have an RFID-enabled payment card in your pocket, you'll be able to wave the card and get an ice-cold Coca-Cola from select vending machines.

MasterCard, USA Technologies and the Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Co. have teamed up to RFID-enable 1,000 vending machines for this venture. From next week to mid-August, USA Technologies will install its Generation Six (G6) e-Port cashless payment terminal in the machines. The terminal has an RFID interrogator that reads RFID-enabled payment devices.

The next time you have a Coke in Philadelphia, pay for it with your RFID-enabled credit card.

MasterCard is purchasing the $400 e-Port terminals and installing them in vending machines to encourage the use of PayPass-enabled cards or key fobs. However, the terminals also read RFID devices used in Visa Contactless and AmericanExpress ExpressPay devices.

All three payment systems share a common air-interface protocol—the ISO 14443 standard—though each uses a unique security protocol to protect account data transmitted between the card and the interrogator built into the payment terminal.

The Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling will pay USA Technologies a monthly service fee of $140 for each G6 terminal and access to the payment network, through which USA Technologies processes cashless payments (made either with a traditional mag stripe card or an RFID card). It will also pay a processing fee for each cashless purchase made at each machine outfitted with the G6 terminal (regardless of whether a mag-stripe or RFID card is used to make the payment).