Half of us don’t check contactless amount

3rd April 2019

For bar staff who regularly serve customers who have had a few drinks and wave their credit cards vaguely about to pay with contactless card, they wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a new study by money management app Yolt has found that nearly half of UK shoppers (48%) don’t always check the amount before they tap to pay via contactless.

Switch to contactless

The implications of the findings of the study are so significant because the UK has seen a significant shift away from cash to contactless. For example, British Retail Consortium figures show that contactless payments now account for a third of all card transactions in the UK.

Yolt Figures from the new study show that 76% of Britons have used contactless payments, and 40% make half or more of their card payments using contactless.

An average 416.3 million contactless payments are made each month totalling £3.913 million (UK Finance figures), and this is an increase of 147.6% on 2016 figures. At the same time, projected figures from payments industry trade body ‘Payments UK’ have shown that by as soon as next year, more payments will be made using debit cards (with contactless) than using cash.

London especially

Transport for London (TfL) figures, for example, show that 40% of public transport customers in London are now paying for their journeys with contactless payment cards (rather than using pre-paid cards), and 82% of Londoners have used contactless payments, making it the most popular city in the UK for this type of transaction.

It should also be noted that, according to this latest study, only 38% of Londoners said they always checked the amount before using contactless to pay.

Young people least likely to check

The new Yolt study also revealed that young people (18 to 34) are the least likely to check the amount before paying via contactless, with only 39% doing so every time they pay. In contrast, 62% of those aged over 55 in the study said they check the amount every time they use contactless.

What does this mean for your hospitality business?

With the decline of cash as a worldwide trend, we are likely to continue using contactless regularly, and card issuers are likely to continue happily driving the change in customer behaviour. We do need, therefore, to remember that these customers’ payment data is vulnerable if hospitality businesses don’t have a good secure network and PCI compliant systems.  At Astaris, we work with pubs, restaurants, hotels and nightclubs all over London and the South East to keep their customers’ data safe with secure reliable networks so customers can make payments in confidence while staff can be confident that the EPoS equipment will work when they need it.