Visa research shows Australians set to embrace paying with their phones

FEBRUARY 24, 2015
news.com.au
VISA has released research showing Australians are ready for a new payment system that will enable us to pay for things using anything from a smart watch to a chip in our car.
The research shows Australia, with its high rate of smartphone ownership and willingness to shop online using a smartphone, is primed to adopt tokenisation — the payment system that protects people’s credit cards that is at the heart of mobile payment systems like Apple Pay.
The study shows that in many ways Australia is better prepared for mobile payments than many other countries.
The Visa research shows that nearly two thirds of all face-to-face Visa transactions use payWave, compared with just 14.7 per cent in Canada and 21.5 per cent in Singapore.
Nearly half of Australians shopped online using a smartphone last year, compared with 15 per cent of Americans, 20 per cent of Canadians, 14 per cent of Britons and 35 per cent of Singaporeans.
Future … Australian shoppers are much more prepared for a mobile pay system than other
Future … Australian shoppers are much more prepared for a mobile pay system than other countries. Picture: Visa. Source: Supplied
Stephen Karpin, Group Country Manager for Visa in Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific, said he expected the smartphone to be “at the centre of Australian payment experience this year”.
Mr Karpin said 2014 was the year tap-and-go took off in Australia and it now accounts for 75 million transactions a month. This year, would be the “tipping point” for smartphone payments.
The technology that Visa predicts will drive smartphone payments forward is tokenisation, the system Apple adopted in Apple Pay which was launched in the United States last year but is still yet to come to Australia.
Under a token system, a 16 digit code is used in transactions rather than a person’s credit card number being exchanged.
That token can be restricted for use with a particular physical device, such as a smartphone.
If a hacker was to get access to someone’s token, that still does not let them make purchases without the use of the phone.
Smartphone revolution … Customers are increasingly expecting to pay with smartphones, r
Smartphone revolution … Customers are increasingly expecting to pay with smartphones, researches say. Picture: Supplied. Source: Supplied
“Name your next device,” Mr Karpin said. “It is tokenisation that will help transform wearables and other connected devices into secure vehicles for payment.
“What’s great about tokenisation is it doesn’t require consumers to change their behaviour. Tokenisation is a largely invisible part of the payments process and happens in the background.”
“As a consumer, even though you won’t see tokenisation happen, you’ll benefit from the added layer of security. When you shop online with merchants who use tokenisation, you’ll know that the merchant is no longer storing your card details.
“It’s really exciting the possibilities of any device.
“Your car could be interment enable for payments. You would drive into the service station, fill your car up, it would detect that your car would have a Visa payWave transaction enabled and you would just drive off.
“The possibilities are pretty limitless — watches, fitness bracelets, you’ve got phones of course _ coupled with a safe tokenised transaction.”