By Brian Goudie
The holidays are almost here. For most business owners and operators,
efforts to prepare are in full swing. While strategies around staffing,
merchandise or advertising are typically top-of-mind, many may overlook
the importance of payments. Simply put, a business can’t make money if
it can’t accept money. Throughout the year, and especially during the
rapidly-approaching holiday season, it’s important that the payment
experience be efficient, secure, relevant and reliable.
However, driven by consumers’ expectation for personalized access to
information and products anytime, using any device—the lines between
in-store commerce, e-Commerce and mobile commerce are blurring.
Consumers want the best deal in the most convenient and personalized
way. They expect a shopping experience that seamlessly crosses online
and offline channels. They expect universal commerce. For example, they
want be able to make purchases by simply waving their smart phones at
the point-of-sale, or order a pizza with the touch of a button on their
iPad or smart device. Consumers want to interact, review, compare,
manage, transact and buy—whether in a store, at home or on the go.
In this emerging environment, the altered payments ecosystem clearly
presents both challenges and opportunities for businesses—and therefore,
it’s absolutely crucial to prepare now for the increased store traffic
and sales opportunities when the holiday rush hits. Savvy business
owners and operators should explore and implement the best approaches to
maximize cross-channel sales success, including the following strategies
to prepare for the upcoming holiday season.
As a speaker to various merchant PS, I talk about the state of payment
systems today and what the future may hold. In the question and answer
portion of my talk I often encounter a wide range of opinions from
merchants that fall outside what most payment professionals wou1d take
into consideration.
At a recent meeting I heard several skeptical comments from merchants
about cards with near field communications (NFC) capability. First, they
didn’t really understand why NFC was a requirement for credit and debit
cards. They didn’t have a problem with EMV and inserting cards into a
reader because they grasped that a chip connection would be more secure
than the easily readable mag stripe. But their major objection was not
as merchants but as cardholders of NFC-enabled cards. Their worry was
that the cards could be read from devices held by passersby. They didn’t
like the idea very much because they
felt it put their own account data at risk. They didn’t put much stock
in the NFC card barriers of encryption, tokenization and other security
measures.
That meeting alerted me to what may be a mistake some of us are making
in our expectations about public support of new payment methods. We may
be putting too much emphasis on the how and what, not enough on the why.
Why should cardholders change what they’re doing? Why should they trust
that their account information is not going to get scanned by a passing
device? Why should they waive a wallet, when they’re used to taking out
a card? So the card is NFC-enabled - so what? Why should they trust that
their bank information is secure in a smart phone that can be stolen
(and in some neighborhoods, is snatched out of owners’ hands with
alarming frequency.) Why change? Does the cardholder or the merchant
have any sense of why these things are happening? Are they on board?
I believe an essential missing element in the predicted juggernaut of
new mobile payments is trust. Let’s talk about what this means.
Trust is built up slowly over a long period of time. Marry trust with
habit and you have a formidable barrier to getting people to change
their behavior.