Although contactless payment is going through a tough time in the U.S. these days, its global efforts got a huge boost this month. Europe's largest chain—French grocery giant Carrefour—announced the purchase of 12,000 EMV contactless PIN pads, with immediate plans to deploy the pads "at 210 of its French hypermarkets, as well as at all of Carrefour’s petrol stations in France." The world's second-largest retailer's latest contactless deployment, which started in October 2009 but wasn't announced until last Thursday (Feb. 4), is using readers from Hypercom, the chain said. The vendor would only describe Carrefour’s investment as "multi-million dollar."
Domestically, contactless is having problems, with Best Buy kicking out Visa's contactless program and Discover having its own technical problems with contactless . Even many of the U.S. chains that have deployed contactless have done so very unenthusiastically, including Home Depot and Subway.