Can Contactless Payments Get Better?
After a long wait, contactless payments suddenly picked up with the COVID pandemic, but a disconnect among sector players is causing chaos at the point of sale.
Amid COVID, Customers found safety and convenience in paying by simply waving their contactless chip cards at a chip-ready terminal--without coming into contact with the POS terminal.
Adoption has increased worldwide as card brands and payment processors implement, catching the attention of many consumers.
For years, international card networks have campaigned for the contactless adoption, trying to push issuers and merchants who've lagged and implemented the tech step-by-step on their own schedule.
And when a pandemic presented a fresh opportunity, advocates tweaked their marketing messages to increase consumer awareness of contactless tech. The fear of catching the deadly virus has prompted shoppers to prefer swaying cards at sellers' checkout instead of physically touching a Point of Sale.
A poll by Mercator Advisory Group released in the heat of Covid-19 revealed that 35 percent of shoppers were paying more or much more through the contactless chip card. Another 35 percent of mobile wallet user used it more or much more.
According to the study, 12 percent of cardowners who've never used a contactless card tried it first in response to Coronavirus.
The Challenges
- An Uneven Experience
But as the sector celebrates this victory, Contactless payments still faces a few challenges that advocates must address.
First-hand users have reported an uneven contactless experience. Sometimes the transaction is smooth, convenient, and superfast. Other times, the cardowner won't locate the NFC reader on the terminal and must wave the card weirdly up and down to complete the transaction.
And sometimes, the payment fails, possibly because of incompatibility between the chip in the card and the obsolete terminal systems.
- Contactless isn't really contact-free
Contactless payments have also failed to offer a total contact-free checkout experience through cards and wallets, which causes further friction at checkout and involves interaction with a terminal.
Though a cardowner's goal is to avoid contracting a deadly battle from a payment terminal, most sellers still insist that consumers hold the display window or use a stylus to choose a payment type, verify their amount or choose a receipt type.
All these tasks involve user attention and activity, defying the whole point of a quick contactless transaction.
The takeaway
There are still lots of opportunities to improve contactless payment. Advocates must seek to address consumer concerns while major players coordinate for a consistent experience.
Author Bio: Payment industry guru Taylor Cole is a passionate payments expert who understands the complex world of . He also writes non-fiction, on subjects ranging from personal finance to stocks to cryptopay. He enjoys eating pie with ice-cream on his backyard porch, as should all right-thinking people.