For any business, a seamless and nearly invisible payment process is the final checkpoint of a positive customer experience. However, while consumers in the U.S. are getting more comfortable with using chip cards in a variety of verticals—including retail, hotel, lodging and the food and beverage industry—there’s still a fair amount of confusion about when to dip the chip and when to swipe. Many consumers are getting used to it but are still frustrated with the perceived speed of an EMV transaction.

Mobile wallets may be great for consumers, but for U.S. retailers, trying to decide if and when they’d like to accept different wallets can drive them crazy. There are simply way too many options and with the growing number of mobile wallet apps in the market, it’s becoming more complicated for retailers to support them all.

Moving Money: Consumers and Mobile Payments

Smartphones are in the hands of more Americans than ever before. Pew Research estimates that 68% of the population owned a smartphone in 2015 and that number is expected to keep growing. In addition to the connectivity that smartphones provide to information, entertainment, and one another, they can also help simplify payment transactions. The availability of smartphone-based digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Wallet have morphed mobile devices into payment devices, while also changing the dynamics of traditional cash-only transactions. Now parking fees, public transportation fares, and fast food purchases are just some of the smaller-ticket items that can be paid using mobile devices.

We recently had the opportunity to interview our partners and Ingenico experts regarding their payment predictions for 2016. We covered many topics ranging from EMV, NFC, payment security, Omni-channel, unattended solutions and more. This is the first of a three-part video blog series.

The hospitality industry sees a lot of payment transactions, and in most of these situations, the servers/staff takes the credit card from the customers to process the payment. In a typical dine-in restaurant environment, the server drops off the check, the customer puts their credit card in the billfold, the server then picks up the check, swipes the card in the back of the restaurant and brings the customer a receipt to sign. But, this payment experience is now starting to change…and for good reasons. Many hospitality businesses need to rethink how they accept payments and consider bringing payments to the consumer at the point of service as a viable option. Why? Let’s take a look at five reasons why paying at the point of service is beneficial to the hospitality businesses: