Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Increasingly, everything is in place for contactless payments. The only thing in the way is an awareness gap—one that isn’t getting any smaller. And there’s no reason for it to shrink. Card issuers aren’t pushing contactless, retail executives don’t see an obvious benefit, and customers don’t even know it’s there.

Enter the giant contactless users such as transit systems. The Chicago Transit Authority sends someone through a subway turnstile or past a bus fare box 1.7 million times each day. That’s a lot of payments—most of which involve running a ticket through a scanning machine that has lots of moving parts. Moving parts break down. Contactless cuts out many moving parts. That means it’s very much in the interest of the CTA to push contactless as its main mode of payment.

And that’s exactly what’s specified in the Request For Proposals that the CTA just issued as part of its project to replace its fare system, due to be completed by 2014. The RFP not only directs the winning vendor to make contactless the primary way of getting through a turnstile, but also requires the vendor to launch a promotional campaign to encourage riders to use contactless.

That won’t just make the CTA the biggest contactless user in Chicago. It will also make millions of Chicagoans (and more than a few tourists) aware of contactless, many for the first time.

Or consider the 2012 London Olympics, which faces the same kind of problem of scale: eight million ticket holders who will have to file past large numbers of pay points during the course of the games. At that scale, saving a second per person really does matter. Saving a second each time a member of those huge crowds buys a ticket, a ride, a meal or a souvenir could be critical in getting those crowds where they want to go on time—and where the Olympic organizers want them to go.

That’s part of the reason Olympics organizers are promoting it as a “contactless event,” and pushing card issuers to get 20 million contactless payment cards into the hands of British customers by the time the Olympics arrive. It’s not so much that the Olympics loves contactless. It’s that the Olympics needs contactless.

And as Olympics attendees use contactless, that awareness gap will close. They’ll know contactless exists. And many of them will be inclined to use it more often.

No retailer individually could hope to make a major dent in the contactless awareness gap. Chances are, even a group of major retailers could take years to get millions of customers using contactless. The Olympics will do that in 17 days.

Transit systems and giant events might seem like the wrong way to go about transitioning to contactless. Yes, this should be something that retailers and card issuers can do for themselves. But they can’t. It’s going to be up to those big users to make customers aware of contactless. At least for now, retailers are just along for the ride.