Navigating the health pandemic has led to the increased adoption of contactless and digitalised payments across the globe, with merchants and consumers significantly moving away from cash.  

Speaking to Payment Expert, Craig McClure, Director, Relationship Management at CB911 emphasised his belief that changes within the climate for contactless payments are likely here to stay. 

He stated: “Contactless is especially interesting in terms of what’s going on in the industry anyway, so a lot of the growth and how we are moving essentially away from cash so more online, more contactless, more digital, we have put on about four or five years’ growth in the past six months. Just because, we have had to and people have been forced to.

“Contactless in particular, whilst it was growing anyway and that’s been driven by things like being able to buy bus fares, transit or tubes – meaning people don’t need to break money to make small purchases. Those have been driving anyway, but now that we are in an environment where a lot of merchants are not accepting cash, they prefer cards and contactless is just the ideal tech for that.”

He also went on to underline his belief that the significant shift to contactless is here to stay even following the pandemic, as he highlighted that the evolution was already underway. 

“All the evidence from before indicates that when customers get comfortable with the technology and they get comfortable with the experience, in every age group when you activate someone to start using contactless, they begin to use it more and more. It replaces 70/80% of what they were doing before.”

In terms of the risks involved, he added: “The banks are pretty much on top of security and rules that govern how the thing is used. But, I think that when you look at that they can be used without authentication and that we have increased the limit, it makes it quite an attractive tool for, I guess, more opportunistic fraudsters.”