Germany’s Sparkassen are already in an extended phase in their NFC project, issuing contactless cards and putting according terminals into the market. The plan is to issue about 16 Mio. Cards till August 2012. Currently the project is in a pilot phase with merchants situated in the area of Hannover, Braunschweig, Wolfsburg. The NFC card can be use for payments at the POS as well as for automated vending.

The NFC card is prepaid, which requires top-ups before usage. The amount of money actually is stored on the chip card in order to make quick transactions at the POS. Therefore the cards have to be top-up at a terminal. This is already the case for the “Geldkarte” as well as the Austrian pendant “Quick”. Both card leak users, as it is inconvenient to top-up a card as well as converting a flexible means of payment (cash) in to less flexible and less accepted on (card).

The card itself will not provide customer information to the merchant. The payment schema explicitly was designed for fast payments with out PIN or a signature. Therefore the amount to be paid is limited to 20 EUR. This is similar to the credit card products PayWave (Visa) and PayPass (MasterCard).

Heise.de

On the other side the LBB (Federal Bank of Berlin) is the frist Visa PayWave Issuer in German.