From the Principal’s Office
This is the first of a series of short articles focused on a specific retail technology that we feel is underutilized, underestimated yet very powerful. We will have contributors from within the industry write about some of these as we move along. We hope you can make practical use of these short articles.
Please let us know if we can assist you to make these happen for your business!
Contactless Payments – Bob Amster, Principal – RTG
Even before the virus pandemic hit our shores and forced an interest in all things contactless, contactless payments had already been deployed by some retailers, large and small, and almost ignored by others.
Contactless payments started with the likes of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, Fitbit Pay and Ali Pay. These are all mobile, EMV-compliant forms. Then, along came credit cards with embedded NFC chips (Tap-to-Pay) from Visa, MasterCard, and many banks.
The forms of payment have multiple advantages to the consumer and to the retail (or other) establishment. The consumer can make the mobile version of contactless payment part of the smartphone line-up of apps and ditch the cards (eventually). Both forms qualify as ‘card present’ transactions, so the merchant is protected against fraudulent claims. The time of authorization is a fraction of all other forms. (In some establishments, printing a two-foot-long receipt takes longer than the authorization step.) Security on these forms of payment is much higher than in heretofore ‘traditional’ tenders.
As to adoption and deployment, there is the expense associated with replacing current credit-card-authorization terminals and that may be the overriding reason for delaying deployment. But the influence in the other direction will be – you guessed it – consumer pressure. The younger generations are going to demand fast and simple, period.