Barclaycard sees end of road for plastic cards

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Barclaycard sees end of road for plastic cards

08/09/2008 13:50

LONDON (Reuters) - The country’s biggest credit card provider Barclaycard is to boost its contactless payment system which it believes will mean the physical plastic credit card will die out in the foreseeable future.

Barclaycard, owned by Barclays , introduced its first contactless credit card as the OnePulse product one year ago, in which a microchip allows customers to pay for goods by touching the card against a reader without having to remove it from their wallet or purse.

The group now plans to issue over one million contactless cards by the end of this year. Barclaycard then plans to make it possible to put the chip into a mobile phone or key fob, meaning the need to carry a plastic credit card will disappear.

"In time you won’t have to carry a plastic credit card around with you if you don’t want to, although some people will chose to for nostalgic reasons," Barclaycard Chief Executive Officer Antony Jenkins said in a statement on Monday.

"If I had said to you 10 years ago that you couldn’t pay with a cheque at the supermarket, you wouldn’t have believed me. That is now the reality, and we see plastic cards going the same way eventually," Jenkins added.

(Reporting by David Jones; Editing by Quentin Bryar)

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