News

Contactless takes a back burner, but it's still heating up

August 18, 2016

ATM operators keeping tabs on NFC contactless card and mobile wallet technologies will find a few interesting statistics in a study released last week by the National Retail Federation and the market research firm Forrester.

"State of Retail Payments 2016," finds that obstacles to EMV adoption and an emphasis on security have pushed mobile payment plans to the sideline — but not out of the picture.

The study polled CIOs and technology executives at 59 large and mid-size retail companies, according to a press release. Of these, 86 percent said they have implemented or expect to implement EMV by the end of 2016.

Additionally, 93 percent of respondents said they expect to have point-to-point encryption in place by the end of 2017, and 61 percent expect the same for multichannel tokenization. Mobile and digital wallets have taken a backseat, with only 17 percent citing it as a top issues this year.

However, mobile acceptance actually could be getting closer — not despite the focus on EMV, but rather, because of it. Since NFC capability is built into most EMV terminals, 72 percent of survey-takers expect to be equipped for NFC by the end of 2017.

Still, indications are that uptake for mobile payments will take some time; 68 percent of respondents said they plan to accept only one "or a very few" types of digital wallets out of the increasing ranks of competitors.

More than three-quarters (76 percent) plan to accept Apple Pay by the end of 2017, compared with 59 percent for PayPal; 53 percent have no interest in Venmo, 43 percent are not interested in Alipay and 38 percent have no interest in Pay With Amazon.