Paying for things is getting harder

Tap, Swipe, Chip, Dip, Sign, Debit, Credit, Scan… Did you want a receipt?

Payment has gotten harder, not easier because mobile phones are pushing retailers in one direction while credit-card regulations and processors are pushing them in a different direction. Retailers themselves are looking for ways to save money on transaction fees and that’s leaving customers stuck in the middle.

The user experience for credit-cards worked until recently. Credit cards are light, fit in your wallet, have no battery and had only one way to use them.

A credit card swipe took 1–2 seconds.

Over the last six months, that’s no longer the case. Each retail kiosk has conflicting signs telling me to Tap, Swipe and Chip. What’s worse, the new chip method seems to be the most error-prone and time-consuming. Flashing signs tell you to not remove your card. It gets me almost every time.

Mobile solutions are no better. Scannable solutions like LevelUp and Starbucks fail the ubiquity test. Consumers don’t want a different solution at each retailer. While these solutions work, their lack of mass deployment leaves them in a niche use-case.

ApplePay and AndroidPay are somewhat unpredictable and not accepted everywhere. It’ll be years before mobile payment is broadly accepted. Tapping your phone on a payment terminal that doesn’t support mobile payment is on par with banging your head against a non-existent wall; not actually painful, but certainly frustrating.

I firmly believe that mobile is the future of payment but not in its current form. For a true digital payment and transactions we’ll have to have digital currency. Not the bitcoin, type of digital currency but perhaps something similar.