As defined below, such payment systems combine in-store shopping with mobile payments. In recent years, the use of these systems has become more mainstream. As proximity mobile payments come of age.
We first wrote about mobile payments in 2012! When this technology was early in its development.
Convenience and Speed: Proximity Mobile Payments Come of Age
To begin, we present an early [2012] definition of proximity mobile payments (PMPs) from Smart Card Alliance:
The ability to pay for transit fares, groceries, and other products by simply waving a mobile phone near a point-of-sale (POS) device represents a new payment frontier in the United States and Canada. Although the technology has been in place in Japan for five years. Such payments, called proximity mobile payments, are defined as payments to a merchant initiated from a mobile phone that uses Near Field Communication (NFC) technology . Which is held close to the merchant’s POS equipment. Proximity mobile payments offer new business and revenue opportunities to banks, mobile network operators (MNOs), merchants, processors, and startups.
In August 2021, Statista presented data relative to the current use of PMPs. Raynor de Best reports that:
This chart gives information on the proximity mobile payment transaction value in the United States from 2018 to 2023, in billion U.S. dollars. In 2023, near-field-communications or other contactless technologies will generate over 220 billion U.S. dollars in transaction value. As of 2018, about 25.3 percent of smartphone users in the United States actively engaged with proximity mobile payment services. Industry experts project mobile proximity payments amongst the most successful future mobile payment methods. Popular application areas pay for transport and transit. As well as retail goods and services. According to a survey of digital payment users, the most common mobile in-store mobile payment method involves barcode or QR code scanning. And a further 12 percent had waved or tapped their mobile phone to pay at check out. Mobile wallet apps facilitate mobile payments. PayPal, Google Wallet and Apple Pay are amongst the most popular digital wallet services according to U.S. users. A current example of mobile proximity payment usage involves Starbucks. By waving their phone at the checkout counter, customers pay via mobile app
