Contactless Payments on the Rise

Perhaps you can relate to this: You’re in a hurry. You’ve finally made it to second in the checkout lane. It seems to be taking a little longer to ring up the person ahead of you than usual, so you look up from your phone and realize that person has pulled out a checkbook. That’s right, they are writing out an actual paper check as their form of payment.

In the post-COVID era, will card-swipers elicit the same surprise as check-writers do today?

There’s been an increase in contactless payments since the coronavirus outbreak. A Mastercard survey found 46% of respondents have shifted from cards to contactless, and the figure grows to 52% when you look only at people under 35.

We wonder how adoption might be further impacted if there were fewer concerns about fraud so that contactless maximum payment amounts could increase — to the point of being feasible to cover the bill for restocking trips at the grocer, or supplies for quarantine-inspired DIY projects at the home improvement store. OK, we’re stepping down from the “in a perfect world” soapbox now.

Still, with more people than ever using contactless right now, we wonder if we’ll see a corresponding surge in RFID protectors as swag items at industry conferences when those resume (whenever that may be).