Following the recent UK launch of Android Pay, new MasterCard figures show that one-quarter of UK shoppers intend to use their mobile to make contactless payments in the next 12 months.
Despite the relative infancy of contactless mobile payment technology in the UK, 1 in 20 people are using it once a week or more. With more mobile handsets enabled for contactless payments, reservations are slowly beginning to disappear and as many as 13% of British consumers have no reservations at all, says the study.
Of the three quarters who don’t use it, the most common fear is losing the device. 65% of people worry that if their device falls into the wrong hands someone can use it to buy things with their money. Anecdotally, many of the others simply don’t yet see the point, don’t know they can and, in the case of one of this Editor’s nearest and dearest, “because she feels like a wally” doing so.
Elliott Goldenberg, Head of Digital Payments, MasterCard UK & Ireland said: “We have built the secure foundations for these payments across our network. You can load your MasterCard onto your device through Android Pay, confident in the knowledge that it gives you all the benefits and consumer protection of a card transaction.
Our research shows that 1 in 3 people intend to link to their credit card for that reason.”
He continues: “Mobile phones offer people the means to make contactless payments over £30 because the user can be verified, for example by means of their fingerprint. The other key difference is the use of digital tokens – in short, your card details aren’t passed onto the retailer because they are not stored on the phone in the first place. As consumers increasingly recognise these benefits, mobile payments will begin to see the kind of growth that contactless has had over the last two years.”
Developers can quickly enable Android Pay for in-app payments through the MasterCard Payment Gateway, another gateway Premium Virtual Mastercard – Black Edition makes it easier for retailers of all sizes to accept in-app payments securely from Android users.
Android Pay is accepted at more than 400,000 contactless terminals throughout the country, as well as the 5 million contactless terminals in 77 countries around the world. To find a listing of contactless-enabled UK retail locations, download the MasterCard Nearby app or go to: www.mastercard.com/contactless.
MasterCard has created a way to digitally enable cards (through ‘MDES’), which has been built to ensure transactions can take full advantage of the most advanced payment security in the world.
In setting up a device for Android Pay, MasterCard generates a digital “token” that is associated with that device and stored on a secure server. Not only is that token number different from the actual card number but it is also prevented from transacting via any other device. When the consumer uses their mobile device in a transaction, it is the token provided to the store, and not the real card number.
Android Pay is available on a wide range of devices from various manufacturers and MasterCard has already worked with Bank of Scotland, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds, MBNA and M&S Bank to enable their cards for use in the new scheme. MasterCard continues to work with further UK banks to enable more and more consumers to take advantage of this exciting new payments innovation.
MasterCard is ensuring that mobile devices will be able to be used almost everywhere for payments by requiring that all retailers across Europe which accept MasterCard, must also accept contactless payments by 2020 at the latest.