Big Issue vendors to go contactless

Sellers of the Big Issue will now able to accept contactless payments following successful trials with mobile point of sale company iZettle.

A statement pointed out that cashless payments now outweigh cash transactions, with one in five people in the UK now not carrying notes or coins at all, while contactless card or mobile transactions accounted for 5.6 billion payments last year.

The trial scheme, conducted across five cities in the UK, resulted in cashless payments taking an 80 per cent share of all sales.

With the Big Issue's backing, iZettle is making card readers available to vendors across the country for the reduced price of £9 and offering a per-transaction fee "significantly lower" than its standard rate of 1.75 per cent.

Hugh Palmer, a vendor at St Paul’s underground station in London, commented: “It’s promoting you and people think, ‘ooh he’s got contactless, he must be OK’.

“You fit back into society; before when it was cash only you would get days when people just didn’t buy the magazine from you.”

Elsewhere in the capital, the City of London Corporation recently installed four new contactless card points to help the area’s homeless and rough sleeper population get donations from those that don’t carry cash.

In May last year, The Mayor of London partnered with iZettle to launch a contactless payments initiative for buskers in London.

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