MasterCard gets clever

I just read an article on The New Zealand Herald website about the new type of cards MasterCard are launching. They are called "pay pass" cards and are expected to be in circulation of 4 million people by the years end. What is a pay pass card? Well they are equiped with a radio frequency chip that allows the user to wave the card at machine readers at till point and petrol pumps without actually having to hand it over for purchases. Definately an interesting concept. Citibank, HSBC, and Key Bank are offering them to customers in America already. But I wonder how useful this will be until the merchants are up and running with the right equipment to accept these sorts of cards. I assume the said banks have changed their retail customers machines over to accept these new and innovative cards. In New Zealand we are slowly starting to develop into chip cards, but they still require inserting into the machine. I discovered this when the EFTPOS machine at work was swapped to be able to accept the chip cards. I am not entirely sure what the difference entails, but I think it is largely to do with safety of cards and the ability to track them if they are stolen? So MasterCard seem to be coming up with the solution to forgetting credit cards in shops and petrol stations by allowing the card to never actually leave your hands. This definately puts one up on MasterCards major rivals such as Visa and American Express, and I do think that this will become the standard form of payment in the future.