The U.S. Is Behind on Mobile Payments, But We’re Catching Up [telecom]

[Bill Horne]

By Joe Fedewa

Using a phone or watch to pay at a terminal is not new. iPhones and
Android devices have both been able to do it for a long time. So why
is the U.S. still lagging behind with mobile payments?

In other parts of the world, such as China, nearly 90% of people use
mobile payments. That’s more than double the U.S., but adoption is not
the only problem. The infrastructure for mobile payments in the
U.S. is just not there yet.

https://www.howtogeek.com/833644/mobile-payments-are-still-not-great-in-the-u.s./

--
(Please remove QRM from my email address to send a message to my personal account)

[Michael Trew]

On 10/2/2022 12:29, Bill Horne wrote:
> By Joe Fedewa
>
> Using a phone or watch to pay at a terminal is not new. iPhones and
> Android devices have both been able to do it for a long time. So why
> is the U.S. still lagging behind with mobile payments?
>
> In other parts of the world, such as China, nearly 90% of people use
> mobile payments. That’s more than double the U.S., but adoption is not
> the only problem. The infrastructure for mobile payments in the
> U.S. is just not there yet.

I believe that is also related to your region. I've heard from
west-coast friends that mobile-payments are more common out their way.
In the mid-west (eastern Ohio), I very rarely see such a thing. Many
elderly people would not understand how it works. While I'm younger, I
do not have a smart phone.

In Germany, cash is still king. It appears that just fewer than half of
transactions are now in cash, as of late, but historically, Germans have
held onto their cash. Citing 2019 NPR article, linked below:

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/09/728323278/for-many-germans-cash-is-still-king

[Garrett Wollman]

In article <Esr_K.532286$Ny99....@fx16.iad>,

Michael Trew <michae...@att.net> wrote:

>I believe that is also related to your region. I've heard from
>west-coast friends that mobile-payments are more common out their way.
>In the mid-west (eastern Ohio), I very rarely see such a thing.

"Mobile payments" use the same EMV ("Europay, Mastercard, Visa"[1])
near-field communications technology as tap-to-pay credit cards, which
nearly all banks are issuing now. It's probably possible for a
merchant to buy a payment terminal that doesn't support NFC but any
new point-of-sale installation is going to include it.

That doesn't mean that the banks don't put barriers in the way of
enabling mobile "wallets" like Apple/google/Samsung Pay. For example,
my credit union contracts out its credit card business to a bank
called Elan, and while they're perfectly happy to issue me a
contactless credit card, they make it a hassle to enroll that card in
Google Pay -- you can't use the on-device enrollment flow, you have to
speak to a customer-service representative on the phone and get an
authorization code. Many people presumably just give up at this
point.

-GAWollman

[1] Europay merged with Mastercard about 20 years ago, but at the time
the standard for "chip and pin" payments was being promulgated in
Europe, those three companies were the major card networks in Europe,
and name has stuck even though the company no longer exists.
--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wol...@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)