TAMPA, Fla.—One payments expert thinks the lack of mobile acceptance at merchants will do as much as EMV to back up holiday lines.
Many experts have stated that the longer time it takes to “dip” the EMV card as opposed to swiping, as well as the additional time needed when consumers do not leave their chip cards in the reader long enough and the process is repeated, will lead to backups at the POS counter during the holidays.
Tom Davis, chief technology officer with CSCU, explained that like many other consumers, he has become a mobile-first user.
“I think there are some, like me, who have forced themselves to go mobile first,” said Davis. “I found this sort of clumsy at first, but I have gotten used to it. I am finding that there are still many terminals that don’t accept the mobile transaction. Because of this, many times I still end up pulling my wallet out, which only increases the overall time to complete the transaction.”
Davis, however, uses the Samsung S6 and Samsung Pay, which has the greatest acceptance of any digital wallet. Samsung Pay, which has NFC, also uses "magnetic secure transmission," which "spoofs" a traditional card swipe with magnetic fields when users hold their device near a traditional mag-stripe payment terminal.
“I find that I can successfully complete a transaction about 50% of the time,” said Davis. “I have gotten used to where my phone will be accepted, so the failure rate is going down. Bottom line, in my opinion merchant acceptance and merchant associate knowledge of mobile POS wallets is going to be the first hurdle to changing behavior from EMV/swiping to mobile. After that, loyalty will be the next line of attack.”