RSPA EMV Committee Panel: Smartphones May Be The Future Of Payment "Cards"

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

At the Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA) EMV Committee session at RetailNOW 2015, panelists discussed what they believe future payment solutions may look like. 

Panelists were Brad Giles, director of channel marketing at Cayan; Randy MacDonald, director of global security solutions at Verifone; Ray Moorman, director of product management at Vantiv;  John Morgan, director of independent solutions providers for Moneris; Shawn Prasaud, senior product manager for Sterling Payment Technologies; Derik Richards, product manager of integrated solutions at  Heartland Payment Systems; and Chester Ritche, SVP of Worldpay. The panel was moderated by Beatta McInerney, business development manager, payments for ScanSource.

One idea that surfaced during the discussion titled “What Is the RSPA Doing To Help Members With EMV Migration In the U.S.?” is that your merchant IT clients need to be thinking about mobile wallets for their customers — because that’s where the demand will be. Millennials will drive this trend with $120 billion worth of buying power, and five years from now, they will have $1.2 trillion in buying power driving the trend of using smartphones for payments. 

And when it comes to what the payment card will look like in six or seven years, several panelists offered their visions. McInerney stated, “It will probably be your phone,” a sentiment that was echoed by other panelists as well. They agreed with tokenization and the cloud — with solutions like ApplePay and Google Wallet — physical cards will become unnecessary and the focus to shift from making a payment transaction to the value in identifying the individual.

What is clear from the panel, regardless of predictions of what the future might hold, is that payment solutions are rapidly changing now. Morgan commented, “More change is happening in the next two years than some of us may see in our working lifetimes.”