Photograph — National Accord.

First National Bank (FNB), one of South Africa’s four biggest banks, is the first bank in South Africa to offer its customers the convenience and safety of contactless ‘Tap and Pin’ on ATM transactions.

The innovation allows customers to safely tap their contactless card on the contactless reader of any eligible FNB ATM and enter their pin to complete the transaction without having to insert their ATM cards into an ATM anymore. This functionality is currently available across 100 FNB ATMs with more upgrades to be added by 2019.

FNB estimates that with this innovation time spent to withdraw money from regular ATMs would be reduced by 20 seconds. Likewise, it will further protect customers against card skimming devices by not having to insert their cards into a machine to perform transactions.

Raj Makanjee, FNB retail CEO said the innovation is a significant step in the banks plan to continuously improve convenience and safety of its banking ecosystem adding that contactless tap and pin cards provide opportunities to streamline interactions that align with consumers needs.

“In the last three years, consumers have processed approximately 1 billion Rand worth of contactless payments from 5 million transactions on FNB issued Credit and Debit Cards alone,” said Makanjee. “The frequency of use by consumers has grown by between 100 per cent and 300 per cent on our credit and debit cards respectively, highlighting the confidence of our customers in adopting new and secure payment methods.”

The innovation has enjoyed wide acceptability from FNB customers as FNB started issuing contactless ATM cards since 2015 and since then has over 8.5 million contactless-enabled debit and credit cards being used by its customers.

FNB Pay processes an average of 700 contactless transactions per day while more than 1.5 million Rand worth of contactless transactions were processed on FitBit Pay and Garmin Pay in the last two months.

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