Going to the next Olympic Games in London in 2012? Don't carry American dollars with you! Visa has announced that the next Olympics will be entirely cashless for visitors. The company is going to issue hundreds of thousands of "contactless" credit cards that you only need to swipe over a reader in order to make a transaction. The payment will be processed securely and cost-effectively in seconds. The innovative credit cards will also work on public transport and may even include electronic tickets for different sport events.

Visa, the world's largest retail electronic payment network, believes that the 2012 Olympic Games in London is an excellent opportunity to showcase the new wireless communication technology - "wave and pay" credit cards. The company is going to place contactless readers in every Olympic venue and make the Games entirely cash-free for visitors. For people who do not own a credit card, the company will offer prepaid plastics.

Contactless Visa credit cards come with a special chip with 128-bit and triple DES encryption. It contains the same personal information as a traditional magnetic stripe - cardholder's name and the account number. The transfer of payment information from a plastic to a chip-reading terminal ("reader") occurs only at one to two inches. The chip generates a cryptogram that uniquely identifies each transaction, similar to a watermark that is difficult to forge.

Visa started to use the new contactless technology in UK in September 2007. The company teamed up with five banks - HSBC, HBOS, Lloyds TSB, RBS and Barclays. Up to now they have distributed more than 100,000 "wave and pay" plastics to the customers in London.

More than 5,000 retailers, including such popular English places as McDonald's, Krispy Kreme and Eat have signed up to the new payment scheme. The contactless plastics can also be used to pay for an Evening Standard newspaper. It will help dramatically increase the usage of such credit cards in UK. Visa hopes that by the end of the year there will be over 13,000 retailers signed up to the payWave technology.

Payments with the contactless credit cards in the Olympic Games will be limited to $10. Visa wants to show that credit cards are an excellent choice to pay for small purchases. Consumers often think that plastic money is slower than cash, so they do not associate them with lower value payments. It is estimated that people in UK make 27 million cash transactions a year, worth a total of $250 billion. Over 80% of them are less than $10.00.

Visa hopes that the London Olympic Games will play a major role in encouraging the use of contactless credit cards to make low-value payments. The payWave technology will let people purchase coffee or newspapers by waving their plastic over a reader. There is no need to sign a receipt or enter a PIN number, so the transactions will be fast and easy.

Contactless Visa credit cards are an ideal mode of payment for such busy sectors as fast food, express grocery stores, convenience stores and public transportation - they need to process large numbers of low value transactions as quickly as possible. The innovative technology could also be used for vending machines, road tolls or parking meters.

The introduction of wireless payment technology across Europe brings additional security to traditional card transactions and enables the payments industry to introduce new, faster and more convenient ways to make payments. Visa is going to include the wireless payment capabilities in all of its credit cards within 5 years.