When I talk about Burbank’s CPoI, one of the questions I am sometimes asked, is Will consumers tap their cards on their phones?
If you think about CPoI with respect to any new technology, of course there will be a period of settling in; where the innovators and early adopters jump all over it, the more cautious folks watch for a bit before they get on board, and the laggards bring up the rear.
The thing that will speed this process up, however, is that the process of CPoI (Tap and PIN) is not ‘new’. Only the channel is new. Contactless payments have been around since the early 2000s and consumers are as familiar and comfortable with paying this way as they are breathing. In fact, most consumers prefer contactless for its speed and convenience. And even more, they prefer making contactless payments using their mobile phone. So, it’s not a stretch too far to think that if consumers are already au fait with contactless and using their phones to make payments, then the next logical step is using their own device as a payment terminal – tapping their card against their phone.
Don’t just take my word for it, though. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer and innovator of the 1-click checkout also thinks so because it has just started using Visa’s Tap to Pay solution. Now, the team at Amazon would not mess with their incredibly good checkout experience if they thought consumers wouldn’t be ok with it.
But if that’s not enough to satisfy you, let’s go a little deeper into why I think consumers will be happy to tap their phones.
We are more attached to our phones than pretty much anything else
The use of smartphones today is virtually limitless – banking, personal assistants, music players, TV and movie hubs, fitness programmes …. Phones can perform an ECG, take temperature, measure atmospheric pressure, navigate anywhere in the world, calculate, suggest, photograph, purchase ….
We are comfortable accessing our banking information on our phones. We are comfortable having private and personal conversations using our phones. We are comfortable storing and sharing our photographs on our phones. We are comfortable loading digital versions of our payment cards onto our phones and making payments with them. All the things in our lives that we want to keep safe and private, we do on our phones.
What I’m getting at here, is that there is an immense amount of trust placed in these devices that we have within arm’s reach almost 100% of the time.
We live in a world of hackers and viruses
In December 2013, Target experienced a significant data breach of the credit card details of around 70 million customers. This severely impacted its reputation and the trust customers had. This story isn’t unique. There are nefarious people all around the world constantly attempting to find system vulnerabilities to access credit card information for illegal gains. And these stories make the headlines, which is why there is a tangible sense of unease among consumers when providing card numbers online. Particularly with older generations who did not grow up with the internet and are incredibly wary of technology.
And so, there’s a dichotomy between the growing desire to shop online and the fear of providing credit card details, which underscores the conflict between consumers' pursuit of convenience and their concerns over digital security.
In 2020 Mastercard published a global study about ‘Credential on File’, which looked at the willingness of consumers to have their credit card details stored by online merchants, as well as their concerns – of which 72% agreed or strongly agreed they are concerned about someone stealing their saved card details. One could safely assume that this sentiment has increased as the rate of online payments fraud has accelerated since the report was written.
1 + 1 + 1 = CPoI
If you put all these factors together, you get a pretty compelling case for CPoI adoption:
Consumers love and trust contactless payments
Consumers love and trust their phones
Consumers have concerns about entering their payment card details online amid a growing landscape of online fraud
Overlay these factors with the way people expect to move through the world these days – quickly and seamlessly, and you have the perfect storm for CPoI – an enabler of the safest and fastest way to pay online, using a process we already know and love, on our own devices.
In my opinion, you don’t get much better than that.
So, if you’re nodding your head to all this and thinking you need to get CPoI into your online payments experience, perhaps it’s time to give the team at Burbank a shout. We’ll be more than happy to show you a demo of CPoI in action so you can see for yourself how quick, easy, and safe online payments can be.
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