The modern world we live in sees us making payments virtually every day for different reasons. Whether it is settling our bills for the month or paying for goods and services, the average person is sending and receiving money multiple times a day.
And because most of us use our phones for a lot of our transactions, mobile online payments are an essential part of our day. But how exactly does the text side of these mobile online payments manifest? What are the tools that are used to facilitate these payments? And how can we use them more efficiently? In this article, we touch on this and more.
Emerging Mobile Payment Options
The beautiful thing about technology, including mobile payments, is that no single payment method is the final manifestation of its potential. Every year, a new payment option emerges, and this creates more avenues for users. Some of the emerging mobile payment options include things like cryptocurrency. While crypto assets have existed for almost two decades now, mobile payment options are beginning to embrace them at an unprecedented rate. Take things like online gambling payments.
The statistics show that more of us are playing gambling games on our phones, and naturally, this will involve payment. This trend has seen cryptocurrency become more heavily used within the online gambling space, with users connecting their crypto wallets or otherwise depositing tokens onto their gambling apps. As gambling writer Aman Jain explains, Bitcoin deposits at online casinos are becoming just as common as fiat currency, and this shows the evolution of the mobile online payment space.
Technologies Allowing For Instant Payments
One of the reasons why mobile online payments are so popular is that they tend to have an angle of convenience. In many cases, you can use facial recognition or things like Apple Pay or Google Pay to complete purchases without having to tap in card numbers or both through complex processes. These payment options, however, are made possible by a number of technological innovations.
One of these is near-field communication (NFC), which is a wireless short-range technology that allows for things like Apple Pay and contactless tapping to be possible. The technology allows devices to essentially become payment portals that, when in close enough proximity to a merchant’s device, can complete payments. Then there is the classic facial recognition technology that is used to grant access to not only the same payment systems that use NFC but also logging into apps and confirming transactions. As mobile online payments become even more a part of our world, security and efficiency will be at the forefront, and these technologies make that possible.
Credit Worthiness And Open Banking
A major trend in mobile online payments has been the use of buy-now-pay-later services such as Klarna and Afterpay. These essentially allow customers to buy items and services now but pay for them in installments. But behind this convenient payment method is a complex system of creditworthiness checks and open banking. For customers to be eligible for many of these pay-later services, they will need to have some sort of credit standing. Confirming credit standing will require some level of open banking and financial record access. Luckily, these technologies have been used for years now, which is how online credit companies are able to determine credit scores and the like. And as even more things are being put on pay later services, and consumers are ever reliant on them, open banking and credit worthiness checking technology will become more efficient.
QR Codes
If you visited any modern, trendy establishment like a restaurant, you’ve likely seen a QR code that links to a payment portal to allow for fast transactions. Quick response QR technology is at the heart of all of this and has become one of the most used forms of transaction streamlining, even outside of the financial system. Businesses looking to tap into the swiftness of mobile online payments, even as they operate in the material world, are heavily reliant on QR technology, and this shows no signs of stopping.
Digital Wallets
Whether it’s your Apple Wallet, your PayPal account, or any of the many payment processors and financial services apps, we’re using more digital wallets than ever before. These include having our payment card saved for instant retrieval, instant transfer to other people, and so on. Digital wallets are becoming increasingly essential in the world we live in, and it seems that every financial platform is creating some version of these.
These, of course, rely on other technologies, including NFC and facial recognition. And as we move towards an increasingly cashless world, digital wallets and the technologies behind them are only going to become more dynamic and more accessible.
