Online shopping and fast-pass payment technology
are harbingers of the future of
POS payment processing.
It will get faster, easier, and more "futuristic."
Several journalists and tech consultants have formulated very
concrete hypotheses for how
credit card machines, in the contemporary
sense, will become obsolete and a camera or scanner will become the
Point of Sale, with which customers will interact and approve
payment without breaking stride on their way out the door.
For the merchant, the change will be more of the same in some ways.
Upgrades in payment processing will continue to make it faster and
less expensive in terms of employee work hours needed to let customers
check out. But they will pay for this efficiency in percentages of their
sales plus up-front costs to invest in the new POS payment processing technology.
The most likely change in the near future, the next five to 20 years, will be payment
solutions that allow customers to swipe their mobile devices – “phone” will no longer
accurately identify these handheld computers that do so much more than just facilitate
voice and text communications – by a payment location to submit credit card data.
The new technology required will be subject to many of the same security risks.
Transmission from the point of sale through the processing steps will be susceptible
to security breach, and any physical or digital location that stores customer account
data will be a target for thieves. Likewise, for customers the biggest way to compromise
personal security will be loss of the device, parallel to losing a credit card now.
Customers will just swipe their device past a
reader of some sort without any extra people handling
their data, the opportunities for theft or human error
on the part of employees will be diminished. This is good news
for merchants, who will thus be less likely to be the cause of
customer data theft, along with enjoying lower employee costs and more
efficient merchandise turnover due to lack of checkout lines. The future
of payment processing will be defined by these practical efforts at increasing
security, convenience, and efficiency.