Your Guide to Mobile Payments: Apple, Samsung, and Google Pay

Did you know that you can let your customers pay for your goods and services even if they left their wallets at home? It’s true! Thanks to the power of mobile paymentsthrough companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google Pay, your customers can use their mobile phones to make payments. Here’s what you need to know.

Mobile Pay Overview

From a consumer point of view, mobile payments are the next best thing to sliced bread. At least among the consumers currently utilizing these services. They offer the convenience of leaving their wallets at home when going out for a jog without sacrificing the ability to purchase things like coffee, bottled water, or energy drinks along the way.

Even if they’ve gone out to eat and left their wallets at home, customers no longer need to worry about washing dishes to pay for dinner. Instead, they can whip out their smart phones and take care of dinner and the tip. So, how does it work?

• Near Field Communication (NFC): Instead of swiping credit cards or inserting them into chip readers, customers hold their mobile devices up to the NFC terminal (known as a contactless reader) to make their payments.

• Stored on Mobile Devices: All the information you need is stored on the mobile device. You don’t need to worry about security codes, expiration dates, or any other details.

• Equipment: You do need payment processing equipment that accepts NFC payments to process these types of payments.

Many mobile phone makers are getting in on the action with the two big names in the business, Apple and Samsung, creating device-specific accounts and Google Payworking with Android devices. In order for mobile payments to work, customers must have their information linked to their mobile wallets. Information that can be stored in these wallets includes credit, debit, and gift cards.

This allows customers to use any combination of the payment forms listed above. In addition to the mobile phone companies that offer mobile payment services, many other financial institutions are joining in the fray as well, with services such as:

• Chase Pay

• MasterCard PayPass

• PayPal

• Visa Checkout

While adoption has been slow, it is beginning to show surprising growth, especially now that major financial institutions are getting on board in addition to mobile phone companies. That means businesses that offer this service will have a distinct advantage over those that do not.

Are Mobile Payments Secure?

With security becoming an increasing concern for businesses in light of countless high-profile cyberattacks, it makes sense that businesses are concerned about the security of mobile wallet payment processing. Security is a growing concern for businesses in every industry, even small businesses that would not have concerned themselves with these types of matters in the past.

Apple, Google, and Samsung each offer added security to consumers through fingerprint readers, facial recognition, and passwords on their devices. This provides authentication before checkout can occur. Banks and other financial institutions have their own verification protocols to keep transactions secure for users.

As for security for your business, Apple Pay and others use a tokenization payment method where the token is used rather than the actual credit card number. This adds yet another layer of security to the payment process providing peace of mind to consumers and the businesses that accept this particular form of payment.

Why Your Business Needs to Accept Mobile Payments

Businesses have many reasons to adopt emerging payment technologies like NFC. Depending on your business and your community, this type of payment is an ideal way to attract new customers looking for the convenience and security NFC payments provide.

Surprisingly enough, it’s not younger audiences that are most likely to take advantage of this type of payment. In fact, one recent report indicates that adults between the ages of 45 and 59 years of age are most likely to use contactless forms of payment for all their transactions while only 40 percent of millennials would give up carrying cash in favor of mobile payments. Perhaps, all numbers will rise as more businesses accept mobile payments.

Benefits to you include the following:

• Grateful customers. People like convenience and this gives them a convenient option for completing transactions.

• Up-to-date technology. You want your customers to see you as a technology-forward business and this is a great way to do just that.

• Eases bookkeeping burdens.

• Improves the customer experience.

• Faster checkout and payment processing. No digging around for credit cards, waiting for chip reader responses, signatures, etc. It’s a one and done process that allows customers to get in, out, and you to move on to the next customer.

Because so few businesses currently accept mobile payments, being among the first in your community to adopt this growing trend will present your business as a leader and put you miles ahead of your competitors for local market share. Contact Zenti services today to learn more about the possibilities mobile payment processing represents for your business with free NFC equipment and without any long-term contracts.