MasterCard is teaming with Spanish banking groups La Caja Insular de Ahorros de Canarias and EURO 6000 to trial a miniature version of its contactless PayPass card, which is small enough to attach to a keyring.
MasterCard will conduct initial trials of its Mini Card in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with 400 customers and 15 merchants, mostly restaurants and pharmacies. A second phase will see the cards rolled out to over 5000 customers.
The PayPass technology will enable customers to pay for purchases of less than EUR40 by tapping their mini plastic card against a specially equipped reader at the selected merchants.
In the past MasterCard has added its PayPass technology to wrist watches in conjunction with Turkey's Garanti Bank and Taiwan's Chinatrust Bank. Meanwhile keyfobs featuring the contactless system are available to Citibank cardholders in the US.
Last October Visa launched its Micro Tag, a chip-based keyring attachment embedded with its payWave contactless technology.
However American Express ditched its Express Pay contactless payments key fob last month following poor customer take-up of the device.