Visa Touch / Smartplus

» see smartplus.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nippon Shinpan switched on a contactless payment system called Smartplus on 22 December 2004. It was available at four bank branches and worked on two models of phone, and the only thing you could do with it was withdraw cash. The shopping half of the product sat on the website under a heading promising it was coming in spring. It arrived eight months late, on 25 August 2005, at nine shops: four branches of a soba izakaya chain and five Junkudo bookshops.

The part that still reads strangely happened in March 2006, when Mitsubishi UFJ gave the technology to Visa. Not licensed, not sold. The press release says the group would provide Smartplus's technology and know-how to Visa free of charge, and that Visa would develop it as an open platform for its Japanese members. Visa branded the result Visa Touch and launched it that September, and from then on the two names rode the same machinery, so a shop that took one took the other.

What Visa got for nothing was a payment network that stopped at the Japanese border. Visa Touch could not be used outside Japan, and it was not compatible with any other Visa contactless product anywhere, including the one Visa was deploying in every other market. The targets were not modest: the 2006 announcement aimed at two million members and a hundred thousand shops by the 2008 financial year, and Visa talked publicly about five million users inside three years.

~ the case file ~

~ the cash machine trick ~

The thing it could do that its rivals could not was give you cash. Smartplus started life as a way to take a cash advance out of a FeliCa-equipped ATM at a former UFJ Bank branch, and that capability stayed with it. Neither iD nor QUICPay ever did this. By March 2006 there were around four hundred of those machines, and in October 2005 the company said it was putting five billion yen into terminals.

Everything else about it was ordinary postpay credit. It was a child card attached to a parent DC, UFJ or NICOS account, so there was nothing to top up and the spending showed up on the normal statement, earning the parent card's points along the way. Under ten thousand yen you signed nothing. You held the card against the reader yourself rather than handing it to the person behind the counter, which the marketing made a point of. The phone version ran on feature phones and was never made to work on a smartphone.

~ sixty-one banks ~

At the end of September 2008 somebody counted everything in the Japanese contactless market, and the result is the only membership figure this scheme ever published. Visa Touch and Smartplus together had 690,000 members and 49,000 readers installed. iD had 8,970,000 members and 380,000 readers. QUICPay had over four million. Against its own target of two million by 2008, it had reached about a third.

The interesting column is the last one. Visa Touch and Smartplus had sixty-one issuing companies signed up, against iD's sixty-six. It had assembled almost exactly as much of the Japanese card industry as the market leader and converted almost none of it into customers. Part of the reason is who was missing: the issuers in the old Visa Japan Association, Sumitomo Mitsui Card included, never adopted it, so the largest Visa business in the country sat out a product with Visa written on the front.

~ the long expiry ~

The notice went up on 10 January 2013 and it is still there, live on the Mitsubishi UFJ Nicos website more than a decade later. New signups would stop on 31 March 2013. Card holders could carry on until their card expired. Mobile users whose cards expired after 1 July 2014 were told the service would end on 30 June regardless. A second notice, dated the day after that deadline, called the closure part of a review of the company's products and asked everyone to wipe the app off their handset by the end of September.

UCS, one of only two Visa issuers outside the Mitsubishi UFJ group that had adopted it, put a blunter reason on its own page, which is also still online: the application window closed because Visa was ending the service. After that it ran down rather than stopped. Lawson gave up accepting it on 23 November 2015. The product pages were deleted in a site refresh that December. For everybody still holding a card, there was no final day at all, because the published position was that each card would simply work until its own expiry date and then not.

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