“Will that be Cash, Card or Sticker?” You might think it unlikely, but with the launch of Barclaycards “PayTag” this could be the question asked shops everywhere soon.

Hot on the heels of the mobile phone networks and handset manufacturers looking to get in on the contactless payment party, Barclaycard have today launched a sticker (about a third of the size of a standard credit card) which can be used to make contactless payment with.

Barclaycard are hoping people will stick the stickers to the back of their mobile phones to enable them to use contactless payment terminals (of which there are expected to be 150,000 in the UK before the end of the year) and therefore nullify the challenge to the traditional credit card issuers from Google wallets/Apple etc.

Of course contactless, at the moment, is limited to £15.00 per transaction (rising to £20.00 in June) so your sticker won’t get you much, but with London Buses set to be contactless credit/debt card enabled the number of contactless transaction looks set to skyrocket. And with the simple addition of a pin number there’s no reason we shouldn’t expect to see all transaction going “contactless” in the very near future.

So will we all be paying by sticker soon? Probably not. This is Barclaycard’s first foray into this space, but Prepaid specialist Kalixa is already leading the way in the UK with Watches and dog-tags which are contactless. This means you won’t end up with the double whammy of losing your mobile and your payment solution in one go. And of course where one goes, other will follow. Expect watch manufacturers, clothing manufacturers etc to want to get in on the chip enabled products space and offer us a yet more that we can buy with a simple wave.

	Written by :	Follow @marktscott
	Mark is the Marketing Director at CompareandSave.com, having previously worked at a number of media agencies on various financial brands. He now splits his time between promoting CompareandSave and investigating new ways to help our readers save money. For press enquiries, please visit our Media Centre page.