Even before the sweeping effects of COVID-19, contactless payments comprised a heavy percentage of modern retail purchases. As once shuttered businesses begin to reopen and adapt to more germ-conscious customers, contactless payments have emerged as an essential solution to have in place.
Contactless payments have gained popularity in the U.S. over the last few years. Mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay were introduced as the EMV migration was in full swing, and allowed merchants to offer their customers another secure payment method. While the adoption of this payment method in retail and restaurants has been consistently increasing, hotel and lodging businesses haven't seen much traction. Part of the reason is that most of these businesses weren’t proactive in adopting it. Why, you ask? For a couple of reasons:
The idea of paying with your phone or your watch at a store almost seemed laughable a decade ago. The typical US consumer was so accustomed to using cash or their credit cards, they had a hard time trusting the reliability of this payment method. Contactless payments have had a slow growth in the U.S. compared to other developed parts of the world – if you look at consumers in Canada and many European nations, they have been used to contactless payments for years and the U.S. has had to play catch up since.
Check out our infographic about the growth of contactless transactions and how it is expected to increase dramatically following the public health crisis that COVID-19 has created globally.
Proving your identity is typically done in just a few ways: with a license, a passport or a social security number. This may soon change with the introduction of digital IDs.
