Leaving Your Home Without Your Wallet: The Rise of Mobile Payments

Not so long ago, a customer who left his or her wallet at home couldn’t buy anything, or at least went through a great struggle to do so. Today, thanks to new technologies, customers are easily able to purchase items wherever they go, even if they leave their wallet at home. 

The COVID-19 era taught both buyers and sellers that contactless payments are the future. Now, 67% of businesses accept contactless options and this market is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. This is a trend that businesses cannot ignore. With buyers looking for more convenient payment options, businesses of all types and sizes should look into adopting contactless payment platforms immediately.

The World of Cashless Payments

Leaving Your Home Without Your Wallet: The Rise of Mobile Payments

As we shift toward a cashless society, the amount of payment options available continues to grow. While cashless payments are nothing new (think checks, credit cards, PayPal-type services, and more), the options for using them today have expanded and are becoming more and more popular. 

Today, 4 out of 5 Americans use a form of digital payment, which is a trend that cannot be ignored. Mobile payments take cashless payments to a new level, allowing customers to leave their wallets at home and simply pay with their phones with services such as with Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Businesses are paying attention. With 73% of SMBs surveyed saying that digital payments are key to their growth, it is clear that new payment technologies are critical to any business’ success. One important new digital technology is mobile wallets. Let’s take a look at mobile wallets and why they are so important for businesses today.

What Are Mobile Wallets?

Leaving Your Home Without Your Wallet: The Rise of Mobile Payments

A mobile wallet refers to a payment tool that can be used directly from your mobile device or from other NFC wearable devices such as a smartwatch. This form of payment is very convenient for consumers, as it is contactless and enables them to pay without having to take their wallets out of their bags. 

A mobile wallet can hold credit and debit cards, rewards cards, tickets to events, airline tickets, and more. Mobile wallets are based on various types of technology including NFC, Bluetooth, and QR codes. NFC is the leading technology that enables consumers to pay with their phones at a POS (point of sale) terminal.

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What Is NFC and How Does it Work?

NFC (near-field communication) is the technology that enables contactless payments by allowing two devices, such as mobile phones and a payment terminal, to connect and share data. What makes NFC technology so unique is that it doesn’t require physical contact and exchanges data between the two objects through radio waves. NFC has a two-inch range of communication, which ensures that payments are secure as it won’t just charge any nearby phones when searching for a payment option – only the one within range. Due to its convenience, NFC has become a standard for most phones on the market. 

NFC must be taken into consideration when businesses are considering different forms of payment. After all, as more and more customers leave their wallets at home, not having a contactless payment option that supports mobile wallets will cause retailers to miss out on sales.

Mobile Wallets & Customer Experience

Leaving Your Home Without Your Wallet: The Rise of Mobile Payments

Over 100 million Americans use in-store mobile payments and it is predicted that half of smartphone users will use mobile payments by 2025. Businesses cannot ignore the opportunity to offer mobile wallets to improve customer experience by ensuring that every customer has a convenient payment option available. 

So, what makes mobile wallets an attractive option for consumers and business owners? And are there any disadvantages to mobile wallets?

Convenience

While people sometimes leave their wallet at home, almost no one leaves their cell phone at home. So, when customers go shopping, mobile wallets are exceptionally convenient, as they enable the customers to purchase goods simply from the mobile device that they’re already carrying around.

This is true for both attended and unattended businesses. Just like it’s easy for customers to purchase an item in-store with their mobile wallet, it’s also convenient for them to use their mobile wallets to buy a drink at a vending machine or to pay for parking at a parking garage. 

Some stores go even further when it comes to mobile wallet payments by developing their own apps to drive customer loyalty and engagement. Chains such as Starbucks have utilized their own app for precisely this purpose.

Consumer Loyalty & Engagement Opportunities

With 30 million Americans using the Starbucks app (beating out Google Pay and Samsung Pay!) this app is a shining example of how mobile wallets can change the way a business operates. Not only can consumers pay for their orders using the coffee chain’s application, they can also place their orders ahead of their arrival, track rewards, redeem offers, and more. 

The Starbucks app makes it easier than ever for customers to become loyal customers. No longer do customers have to save rewards cards in their physical wallets (which may be at home in any case), and no longer do they have to scavenge their bags to find coupons for a birthday or a special occasion.

Mobile wallets give businesses the opportunity to elevate the customer experience by helping them build customer loyalty and by enabling customers to interact with their brand on a regular basis. 

Despite the benefits of using a mobile wallet, some customers are still hesitant to dive into technology-based solutions due to fear of security issues. So, it’s important to address them to ensure that your customers know that their payments are secure.

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Security

NFC-based mobile wallets are considered to be very safe, and in many cases, more so than traditional credit card payments. However, there are issues that can arise such as eavesdropping (when criminals gather data from the payment), data corruption, and interception attacks. While these are legitimate concerns, new technologies are constantly being developed to help prevent these issues today, and customers and retailers should feel confident moving to NFC-based mobile payments.

Give Your Customers the Chance to Go Mobile with Nayax’s Mobile Wallet Solutions

Leaving Your Home Without Your Wallet: The Rise of Mobile Payments

With Nayax, you have the opportunity to integrate your payment solutions with global and local mobile wallets to help you boost customer loyalty and engagement. No matter what payment solutions are popular in your region, our goal is to make it available for your business. Nayax’s offering includes integrated POS devices, a payment suite, loyalty programs, and a business management suite, which allows businesses of all types and sizes to tackle all of their needs with one system.

Nayax also offers Monyx Wallet, a payment app and consumer engagement platform for unattended machines such as vending or laundry machines, which allows operators to introduce loyalty programs together with the convenience of cashless payments. These loyalty programs and engagement tools, such as gamification and punch card campaigns, help you incentivize customers to return to your machines. Monyx also has an SDK capability, meaning that you can integrate all of its capabilities into an already existing app. 

Ready to go contactless and enable your customers to pay with ease? Contact us today

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