Turns Out, We Aren’t Quite Ready for an Invisible Payment Experience

The payments industry works diligently to make the act of transacting a payment as simple and frictionless as possible.  A survey conducted by Paysafe suggests that consumers are quite ready to have the payment process disappear completely however, even among consumers in the UK where less obtrusive contactless payment transactions are the norm.  Internet Retailing reported:

The technology exists to take the friction of payment out of the store experience, but it seems that UK customers may not yet be quite ready to trust it, a new study suggests. 

 At early Amazon Go stores in the US, shoppers put their goods in a basket and leave without queueing to pay. They are sent notification of how much their shopping totaled courtesy of the Amazon Go app, and the bill is automatically debited from their pre-authorised payment card.

It’s one vision of a future of convenient shopping. But are British customers ready to buy into that vision? A new study from global payments provider Paysafe suggests they may not yet be there.

The concerns that consumers had were less about the accuracy of the transaction which is an issue that overtime can be overcome, but more about fraud and data privacy which are consumer perception issues that are more difficult to resolve:

It questioned more than 5,000 shoppers from five markets including the UK, US and Germany for the Lost in Transaction: Payment Trends 2018 report, and found that 59% of British respondents through that check-out free stores sounded too risky, or at least that they’d need to know more before using them. Asked why, 52% said fraud was the biggest barrier to using them, while 43% were concerned about the use of their data. There were also fears that systems might buy things they hadn’t ordered (28%) and that spending might not be controlled (26%). Just over a quarter (28%) had used frictionless payment in apps. 

This survey points out, like many surveys before,  that cash is still a favorite with consumers:

Cash is still winning out as the ultimate payment device: 88% of respondents, questioned inhad used it to buy something in the last month – the survey was carried out between April and June 2018 – while 89% had visited an ATM, up from 84% in 2017. That said, most (62%) UK consumers carry less cash than they did, at £21in 2018, down from £33 in 2017.

Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group