Looking Ahead: Top 3 POS Trends For 2016

By Chris Allen, Director, Demand Generation & Channel Marketing, Vantiv Integrated Payments (formerly Mercury Payment Systems)

With the end of 2015 approaching, it’s time to look ahead to what 2016 will bring to the payments industry. Technology constantly evolves in response to new innovations and consumer behaviors, and point of sale (POS) technology is no exception. The big drivers this year were widespread smartphone usage, the availability of mobile payments, and pervasive concerns about data security and fraud due to the continuing threat of cyberattacks and identity theft. Mercury’s POS experts believe that we’ll continue to see those security and mobility themes dominate POS trends for 2016 as well as greater merchant adoption on both fronts.

Security

EMV dominated payment headlines this year and will likely continue to draw attention throughout 2016. It’s a pretty safe bet to say that EMV is on the minds of all POS providers today, and we’ll see a lot more EMV-enabled POS systems and terminals on the market in 2016.

Adoption of new technologies often follows a general pattern outlined by Everett M. Rogers’ theory, “the diffusion of innovations.” Rogers is best known for introducing the term “early adopter” which describes the first set of people to adopt a particular innovation. Next in the adoption cycle comes early and late majority adopters, followed by the last set referred to as laggards. Merchants who implemented EMV well in advance of the October 2015 fraud chargeback liability shift for card-present chip card transactions could be considered early adopters in the U.S. Now that the liability shift has occurred, we’ll likely move into the majority adoption phase wherein a much greater number of merchants will adopt EMV technology.

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