Majority of retailers favor mobile contactless payments
10 October, 2008
category: Contactless, Financial, NFC
Retailers are more aware of mobile contactless payments then they were a year ago and 52% say they are exploring the use of such payments for improving payment seamlessness and customer loyalty.
Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company based in Boston, surveyed 180 companies to outline the implications and trends related to proximity mobile payments. According to results, retail, hospitality and transit companies are indicating high levels of awareness for mobile payments and NFC acceptance. Eighty percent of companies surveyed are aware of this technology today compared to 63% in 2007 and retailers indicated they may take action within the next 24 months.
“It is evident from our data that the number of companies that are aware of and executing the initial steps involving mobile payments and NFC acceptance has doubled in 2008 compared to 2007 due to mobile payments ecosystem development as well as the changing economic climate,” says Sahir Anand, senior analyst and chief author of the multi-channel benchmark report. Due to the sponsorships of Gemalto and FirstData, a complimentary copy of the report is available here.
Customer convenience was the key business pressure driving 64% of best-in-class retailers towards advanced POS payments such as contactless payments in 2007, says the report. This year, the top business pressure facing 40% of best-in-class retailers is the need for improved customer retention and loyalty, in addition to customer convenience as the next predominant pressure for 35% of Best-in-Class retailers.
“The building blocks for any retail strategy in the mobile commerce sphere has to take into consideration the return on investment (ROI) for every dollar spent on upgrading the payment acceptance environment at the POS,” says Anand.
While all three maturity classes are assessing cost benefit factors in substantial numbers, best-in-class retailers are twice as likely as laggard companies to currently take the next leap in assessing the change management functions including transaction risk assessment, cross-channel process impact, data management, hardware, and POS software changes required for migrating towards mobile payments at POS.
Aberdeen’s data shows that the mobile payments technology landscape is in the early stages of the development lifecycle. In the last two years, advances have been made in the areas of mobile wallet and NFC applications for remote and proximity payments, hardware components that are integrated at the point-of-sale, and the mobile payment services elements related payment gateway and data services. However, this landscape will continue to reform and develop further in terms of user interface (UI), and integrated standards for configurability and extensibility, both for payments and marketing functions.
