Orange and Barclaycard have today (20 May) announced the UK’s first contactless mobile phone payment service.

The service will be available to Orange customers who use a Quick Tap enabled handset. They will be able to use contactless readers available at tills in over 50,000 stores to make purchases of GBP15 (US$24.35) and under.

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Orange also today launched the Samsung Tocco Quick Tap, its contactless payment enabled handset. Customers can transfer up to GBP100 onto the handset’s Quick Tap app, allowing them to make payments using contactless readers.

Barclaycard’s head of digital payments, Tom Gregory, said the bank has seen take-up accelerate in the last six months. “The number of users has doubled in the last six months,” he said, adding that contactless readers are now a standard part of its payment system offered to retailers.

He said the company is now trialling its contactless payment service with Tesco, and claimed that the contactless enabled phone will increase the take-up of contactless payments.

However, despite there being 11.6m cards in the marketplace, Gregory says there is still “a lot” of education that still needs to happen before it becomes widely adopted. He, however, remains confident that in time the technology will be something that many consumers will use.

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“It is something we believe consumers will adopt en masse. Bluetooth seemed pretty strange when it first launched, but now it’s a standard part of very phone. We’re at the start of that journey now,” said Gregory.