Ingenico Experts / Shaping the future of payment
Ingenico Experts / Shaping the future of payment
A few months ago, I was walking past my local curry house when I saw that their neon sign was on the blink. It made me smile: now that, I thought, is some serious targeted marketing. Not only do they recognise that my name is Ian, but also that it’s late so I’m probably hungry... and they have created a whole new cuisine just for me! If only all small merchants had marketing that was as focused as that.
Ingenico, a Worldline brand, has an essential philosophy at its core - to stay up to date with the latest security standards and promote the most secure cryptographic elements for our customers.
For those of us who belong to Generation X, or even the lucky ones known as Millennials, looking back at payment methods in our youth takes us to a time when cash was king, and the predominant method of settlement. Point of sale (POS) terminals, when they arrived, were slow and limited to the major card types such as Visa and Mastercard.
Across the globe, contactless adoption has soared in the past eighteen months. However, the rate of adoption and changes in payment behaviour differ from country to country. Continuing our Contactless 2021 series, Fabien Darné, country manager for France at Ingenico, a Worldline brand, examines the latest trends in the French market and considers why the resilience of local business is providing the catalyst for change.
Contactless transactions have seen huge growth in Europe in the last couple of years, but the pace of progression to digital payments is unique to each nation. Continuing our journey across Europe, we hear from Paolo Temporiti, country manager for Italy at Ingenico, a Worldline brand, who examines the latest contactless trends in the cash dominated Italian market.
Cash payments have been in decline over the past decade, with contactless payment becoming the popular choice thanks to the convenience of a simple tap. This efficiency benefits both merchants and consumers, and since the COVID pandemic swept over the globe, the crash of cash has accelerated with most consumers seeing contactless as the ideal, ‘germ-free’ solution to the unsanitary business of passing change from one sweaty palm to another.