Contactless Makes Contact

One credit card to beam up, Scottie.

Yes, the future is here, kind of. But it will take a little while for us all to catch up making it really sometime in the ...well, future.

Just what is Mr. Black talking about today? Contactless systems and they are available now. These do not require your customers to actually swipe their card and this is part of a long progression. First you had the old knuckle-buster where one would put the card in, lay over it a receipt and carbon copies built in, and manually run the card over. Then came the old black box terminals. You hand the card to the cashier, they swipe it, and hand it back. However with fraud on the rise and the presence of credit card processing software and even the gateways and their advances and woes, the terminal had to buck up and get with the program.

First what they did is started making self checkout kiosks which are especially popular in supermarkets. No longer does one hand a credit card over, but they swipe it themselves. Next was simply contactless. This means that the customer no longer swipes the card but waves it in front of the contactless reader and the reader 'pulls' the information like Luke Skywalker desperately trying to reach is lightsaber which has been conveniently thrown just out of reach.

Pros
Here's what I like about this. First of all, it's pretty neat. The gear is all very Star Trekkie and looks good on the counter. This is good for business especially for smaller businesses because people like shiny, new things. When they see something of this nature it gives one's business more credibility as the customer assumes you have a larger infrastructure in place whether you do or don't. Not to mention, it has a small footprint leaving your business more counter space.

Best of all, it preserves the credit card. Cards these days simply cannot take the strain that once they could. This is because they are used multiple times a day instead of once a week, and they are coming apart at the seams after the first year. It's not because they're cheaper, but it's like a football player with a bad knee. The player is healthy. Heck, the knee is still healthy. It just cannot take the continual strain of burst speed runs carrying a 250 lb. man for on and off intervals over a two hour period. Like Indiana Jones once said, "It's not the years, it's the mileage..."

Cons
We ain't there yet, Skipper. The real problem here is that this really requires a contactless card. This means a card that has a smart chip in it. Some do today, more will have it in six months, and in two years it should be on the way of a pandemic. Fortunately what will boost smart chip style cards which in turn will push contactless ability is the fraud issue. Smart chip cards carry data on them which makes them safer and often has more and more of the customer's data held on it in a highly encrypted little vault making forgery very difficult.

In fact, we should all be looking towards the day when you swipe your card, and your name and picture pops up on a screen at the business where you are making the purchase. I think that will be just before we get the flying cars and his boy Elroy has an automatic dog walker for Astro.

But it's coming.