New Year, New Habits: Contactless payments are here to stay – Visa study

As the one-year mark of the Covid-19 pandemic approaches and digital payments play a larger role in daily life around the world, there will be no reverse gear on consumer behaviour as we head into 2021. In the third edition of its global research study, the “Visa Back to Business Study – 2021 Outlook,” Visa found that the continued small and micro business (SMBs) shift towards digital commerce will evolve in the New Year and bring an increased focus on areas such as security and fraud prevention, and more emerging payment tools such as ‘buy now, pay later’ and mobile payment acceptance.

According to the study, by the end of 2020, 82% of SMBs surveyed had embraced new forms of digital technology to meet changing consumer behaviours. Looking ahead to 2021, SMBs are assessing what other payment technologies are critical to meeting today’s consumer expectations, with results led by security and fraud management software (47%), contactless or mobile payment acceptance (44%), accepting payments via mobile device (41%), instalments or ‘buy now, pay later’ (36%) and digital backend payment operations (31%).

“With greater hindsight into 2020, we can clearly see that the digital payment experiences that excelled the most – contactless and eCommerce – were driven out of necessity and have become more habitual in people’s daily lives at a pace not often seen,” said Kevin Phalen, global head of business solutions, Visa. “If 2020 was the year of contactless and eCommerce, results of this study tell us that 2021 will bring greater attention to security and fraud prevention, and trial of more emerging digital commerce tools that help businesses thrive.”