Cashless Payments At The Olympics Met With Mixed Reviews
EMail
Facebook
TwitterVISA smartphone and NFC payment system in London may not be the revolutionary system everyone had hoped for.
Financial services company Visa is championing a new cashless payment system to help meet the needs of the thousands of consumers flocking to this Summer’s Olympic games in London.
Over a thousand people at the olympic games have been given a special edition, Olympic-branded Samsung Galaxy S III phone. By linking their Visa account information with their Galaxy S III phone, users are able pay for items up to £20 in value simply by swiping their phones over a special NFC reader located at the cash register of most vendors.
Even without a new smartphone, Olympic attendees can still go cashless via Visa’s PayWave contactless payment technology. Visa cards with a contactless payment logo on the back are able to be read by the same NFC sensors used by the smartphones allowing card holders to simply wave their Visa cards in front of the reader to pay for their items.
Visa’s head of proucts, Jim McCarthy said of the new technology:
This summer we will be demonstrating the future of payments in London — a future where most consumers will rely on mobile devices, tablets and PCs to manage their daily financial lives.
So far the implementation of cashless payments at the London Olympics has been met with mixed reviews. Spectators attending Olympic soccer games at Wembley Stadium complained of  “ridiculous” lines after Visa’s cashless payment machines stopped functioning. Stadium vendors stopped accepting credit cards and asked fans to use cash instead. Exasperating the situation was the fact that Visa reduced the number of available ATM machines in anticipation of their new cashless payment systems, so getting out cash has become much more difficult.
An annoyed fan posted their complaint to Twitter stating:
80,000 people in Wembley Stadium, and the Visa card payment system has broken down — lot of people without cash going hungry & thirsty!
A spokesperson from Visa says they’re working with Wembley team to fix the problem as soon as possible.
More in retail
PurpleList Podcast Episode 7: Building The Netflix Of Home Fitness
At PSFK 2017, Peloton COO and Co-Founder Tom Cortese spoke about how Peloton aims to marry the comfort of home fitness to the high-energy engagement of celebrity-run classes
26 September 2017Patagonia Has Launched Its Own Online Thrift Store
Worn Wear lets fans of the brand buy, sell and exchange Patagonia goods
26 September 2017The Latest
During a webinar on Thursday July 13th at 10am, the PSFK research team will be presenting findings from our most recent report, Future of Manufacturing. For this project, we looked at how brands and organizations can meet elevated consumer needs and combat increased market competition by leveraging connected technologies that give total insights to manage their end-to-end operations and the opportunity to integrate cutting-edge technologies to reinvent supply chains.
Christina Agapakis, creative director at Ginkgo Bioworks, discussed how she uses her background in science and collaborates with engineers, designers, artists and social scientists to explore the many unexpected connections between microbiology, technology, art and popular culture.
