MasterCard and Visa are busy rolling out contactless payment technology, claiming big gains for system, but merchants who have adopted it say it is hard to stand up a business case for the investment.A panel of retailers at yesterday's Payments Australia conference, held in Sydney, agreed that contactless needed some additional customer benefit, such as a loyalty or discount program, to win over customers. And, they said, Visa and MasterCard needed to do a better job of explaining their security arrangements for contactless payments.Caltex's card marketing manager, Valentina Dunoski, said the group launched contactless in its petrol stations a month ago. She said the cost-benefit of the project was a "challenge"."When we looked at the budget for infrastructure, devices [and] in-store work, and down-time in stores while the system got up to speed, our view was that the costs outweighed the potential benefits."But then we looked at what was going on in the payment landscape and asked whether we wanted to be early adopters, whether innovation was going to be of value to us and what kind of experience we wanted our customers to have."One of our customer challenges is queues. We have been live for three weeks and we can't say if it really saves people time, but our customers tell us they like it."David Anstee, a lecturer at Swinburne Graduate School of Entrepreneurship and a consultant to the convenience store chain 7-Eleven, said the group's experience was that contactless provided a better experience for customers, "but not hugely better".Anstee said the real payoff from new payment systems involved "offers you can hang off the platform". Anstee said: "The promise is that you can do other things with it. I don't think that is going to happen until we have contactless payments on a mobile phone platform."On a phone you will get a choice of payment systems on one device. You will have receipts sent to your phone. Those sorts of things will make a difference."BP Australia's acquiring and business development manager, Marcus Doherty, said the company had committed to contactless and near-field communication in Europe and was looking at it in Australia.Doherty said: "Two years ago we moved to EMV. Are we ready to reinvest when our technology is only two years old? It is hard to justify."It is not a question of saving on cash handling, because there will still be cash. And we have some safety issues."Like Anstee, Doherty believes the business case for contactless depends on "what else you are going to add to the value proposition". "You have to use payment technology to drive consumer choice. Do you add a loyalty program or discounts?"Anstee said retailers were wary of signing up for new payment technologies when there was no agreement within the industry that common standards would apply. He would like to see governments agree that their contactless transport payment cards would work off the same devices as contactless debit and credit cards.Woolworths' head of payments and ATMs, Abhijit Guha, said the company had