The Pandemic has changed the way people want to pay with concerns over touching surfaces and those concerns are carrying over as businesses are opening to full capacity. These concerns have a caused a surge in Contactless Payments to limit touch points. In fact a MasterCard survey found that almost half of Americans are using Card Tap or Contactless Payments!

Contactless Payments use devices such as smartphones, key fobs, and smart watches. These devices require an App such as Apple Pay or Google-Pay which use NFC (near field communication) to communicate with a payment device.

Card Tap refers to a credit/debit card that has an embedded chip in those cards that use NFC as well to communicate with payment devices by just tapping those devices. These cards will display a symbol that looks like a wave or a sideways WiFi logo located on the front or back of the card.

These ways to make payments are incredible safe as that the card or Contactless device being used by the customer can transmit information no further than 10cm from a payment device. Also, certain contactless applications allow the user to set a limit on the transaction amount. The technology is constantly changing the encryption and tokenization of the card information stored in the applications that are used for Contactless Payments.

Another great benefit of using Card Tap or Contactless Payment devices is it speeds up the checkout process. Contactless and Card Tap take as little as 10-15 seconds to complete while transactions using card-chip readers that require the card being inserted into the payment device can take up to 30-45 seconds to complete.

So, do businesses that accept face to face payment need to take this new consumer behavior as the way of the future? The simple answer is yes. It is a safer way for your customer to pay and speeds up the checking out process that will make your customers happy. If your business payments device does not accept Card Tap or Contactless payments, you will and should upgrade your equipment as soon as possible. These Card Tap and Contactless payments are here to stay and will only grow in use, so businesses need to adapt or they will lose customers.