At last week’s BRIT Awards, an annual pop music awards presented by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Paul McCartney was honored for his lifetime achievements, Amy Winehouse (the previous year’s winner in the category of “Best British Female Solo Artist”) sang, and attendees received cold, hard, virtual cash in their goodie bags, in the form of prepaid, RFID-enabled PayPass payment cards from MasterCard, the event’s lead sponsor.
This is the second time MasterCard has used a major entertainment event as a venue for showcasing its PayPass product, which employs radio frequency identification to transmit encrypted payment data to RFID-enabled payment terminals. In October 2007, the company issued the cards to attendees of Fashion Rocks, a star-studded fund-raising event for The Prince’s Trust, a youth charity founded in 1976 by the Prince of Wales.
“These type of events are a great opportunity to create a limited-edition, exclusive card with PayPass,” says Oliver Steeley, MasterCard’s head of strategy and business planning in the United Kingdom. “And the BRIT Awards is our biggest client entertainment event of the year, so it’s a great opportunity to put PayPass in people’s hands.”
At the event, which took place Feb. 20, each attendee received a PayPass card loaded with £10 ($20). MasterCard paid for the cards and the value loaded onto each one, as part of its sponsorship. Those with balcony seats could use the card to purchase drinks at concession stands equipped with PayPass card readers, while those seated at a table on the main floor could use them to purchase a £10, branded USB flash drive loaded with musical tracks of selected award winners. (Table guests received complimentary beverage service.)
Unlike those issued at Fashion Rocks, the BRIT Awards-branded PayPass cards can also be utilized after the event, to pay for goods at any merchant location that accepts PayPass. MasterCard launched a large campaign to introduce PayPass in the United Kingdom in September 2007 (see MasterCard Rolls Out Contactless Carpet in the U.K.) and says it is partnering with several U.K. banks, including Barclays, Citibank and HSBC, to issue 5 million PayPass cards by 2009. McDonald’s, Coffee Republic, Krispy Kreme and Books Etc. are among the U.K. merchants accepting the cards.
Because the BRIT Awards prepaid cards were issued anonymously—that is, MasterCard could not match the recipient’s name to the card, or to a MasterCard account that person may already own—the cards are not reloadable. (They’ll also expire at the end of April.) But MasterCard expects that once event attendees have a chance to try out the prepaid PayPass cards, they’ll be more apt to apply for one of their own.
In the United Kingdom, the PayPass RFID functionality works only for purchases of £10 or less. For higher-value transactions, consumer must insert the cards (which also contain a contact-based chip) and key in a personal identification number, used to authenticate the payment card under the EMV payment security scheme used throughout the United Kingdom.
“We are still gathering the feedback from the BRIT Awards,” Steeley says, “but initial feedback is encouraging.” The main benefit of RFID, over using a card’s magnetic stripe card in a payment terminal, is that it enables faster transaction speeds. When event guests are waiting in a queue at a concession stand, time is an important commodity. What’s more, small-value transactions, such as drinks bought at an event, are often made with cash, so MasterCard and other credit card organizations would want to transfer those cash transactions to payments made with RFID-enabled cards.
According to Steeley, MasterCard currently has many more event-specific, prepaid PayPass promotion events in the works. The more event venues it works with to launch these promotions, the more will be outfitted with payment terminals that can accept the cards. “We have some really interesting plans for driving acceptance in these types of locations,” he says.
MasterCard worked with prepaid card issuer Altair Financial to issue the PayPass cards for both the Fashion Rocks and BRIT Award events.
In the United States, The Nederlander Organization has installed payment terminals that accept Visa‘s payWave RFID cards, to help make concession sales at the eight Broadway theaters it operates speedier (see RFID Lands a Role on Broadway). And Florida’s Dolphin Stadium is one of many U.S. sports venues outfitted with payment terminals that can process RFID-enabled credit or debit cards (see Dolphin Stadium Kicks Off a Technology Revolution).