an article written by David Birch, author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services
I travel a lot. And I forget things a lot. Last week I left my payments cards in a hotel safe in Singapore and didn’t realise until I was through security at the airport on the way out of the country. And because of this… well, nothing. It’s a sign of the times that my life was not affected in the least.
Why didn’t the loss of my cards interrupt my business trip? You already know the answer. It was because I had my phone with me and all of the places that I would be visiting were developed countries where all points of sale have contactless interfaces. For everything up to the contactless payment limit (eg, coffee with a colleague) it’s just tap and go, and for payments over that limit (eg, dinner with clients) it’s, well, just tap and go. All thanks to the miracle of CDCVM („customer device cardholder verification method”).
(…)
CDCVM means that we can use our phones to tap and pay for everything from hot drinks to hotel bills, which brings me back to the point of my absent-minded anecdote. I was telling a friend the story — about the forgotten cards — and he said “oh, thanks for reminding me” because he had opened an account with a digital bank almost a year ago and loaded the virtual debit card into his Google Wallet. He had meant to use the bank app to request a physical card but had completely forgotten about it. He had been using his new card for nearly a year, and had never needed to use the plastic version.
Emily Rueth says that for some members of Generation Z, the concept of a physical card just feels „outdated and unnecessary” and I am sure that in this smartphone-centric cohort, it is now reasonable to question why issuers routinely provide physical cards at account opening. As she goes on to to say, issuers that offer a cardless option both at the time of acquisition and at points throughout the cardholder’s lifecycle are establishing themselves as leaders by signalling a shift towards customer-centric banking. But it’s also true for us boomers, as I was reminded when I went to find my Platinum American Express card in order to weigh it (don’t ask) and spent 20 minutes searching the house for it, a card that I use all the time!
These tales tally with what the figures from different markets are telling us. Such is the consumer uptake of digital wallets that one French bank has found that one in five customers now opt not to be sent a physical card, which makes me feel sorry for the marketing departments agonising over card design and colors and logo placement and experiments with different configurations brand and lettering. These skills are being marginalised day by day.
A decade back I was at a product launch where Anthony Jenkins (former CEO of Barclays) accurately predicted that mobile phones woud replace cards before they replace cash. Similarly, a Deutsche Bank research report on the future of payments from 2020 predicted that far from sounding the death knell for cash, the rise of digital payments would instead lead to the extinction of the plastic card. Writing here last month, Jennifer Leigh Parker commented on Mastercard’s “In Control Pay” service — which she memorably called “like a burner phone for your digital wallet” — and concluded that cardless business trips are coming sooner than you think. Well, I hate to disagree with her but as far as I am concerned they are already here!
The full article here
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
