Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
More evidence that consumers are finally adopting contactless payments emerged as Cardknox, a payment gateway, noted a 150% increase in contactless payment use from just from November to April.
Announced Thursday, the increase, albeit lacking volume details, indicates consumers’ mindfulness about reducing physical contact with point-of-sale terminals. Cardknox said some of the growth may also come from a general desire among merchants and software developers to adopt industry trends.
Lakewood, N.J.-based Cardknox says it has worked closely with developers and merchants to prepare in-store systems that support contactless payments. It has offered free contactless-enabled POS terminals and is helping clients enable equipment they may already have.
“For many of our merchants, enabling the NFC feature on their devices was as easy as downloading a new file,” Yanky Weiss, Cardknox chief technology officer, says in an email to Digital Transactions News. “Since the EMV liability shift, the majority of our merchants have EMV-ready terminals that also support contactless payments. Some merchants, though, needed to switch to a different payment terminal that supports contactless payments. While this did take longer, our integration process is pretty quick and easy.”
Weiss’s expectations, like those of many other observers, is that consumer affinity for contactless payments will endure past the cessation of the Covid-19 pandemic, partly because it created a reason for them to change their behaviors.
“Contactless payments are really much more convenient and faster to use than other payment methods, so now that people are getting used to pulling out their phone or tapping their card at checkout, I think they’ll want to stick with contactless payments long-term,” Weiss says.
