While there are too many downsides to the 2020 global pandemic to list, there certainly are some technology upsides we can be thankful for. Significant traction has gained momentum with ideas and platforms that were in development or infancy, due to changing consumer behavior. In my digital retailing courses each semester, we review and discuss the present consumer understanding and adoption of digital payment systems. Generally, Europe has been much quicker to embrace the platforms, in the same way they were much earlier implementing chip and pin encrypted security for our credit cards than we were in the US.

The digital payments conversation is admittedly both confusing and complex to consumers due to the numerous approaches banks, credit card companies and retailers have taken. There presently is no one single de facto route, nor any promise that more options aren’t on the horizon. The newest company to jump into this fray is Venmo, the money transferring app founded in 2009 by two college roommates. It was acquired in 2013 by PayPal. They’ve continued to develop out the digital payment services and an October Bloomberg article describes how they now have launched a virtual credit card. It uses the Venmo app on your smartphone, offers a tiered cash back loyalty rewards structure like the big players and began by rolling out QR code scanning for retailers. It also can be integrated with Google Pay and Samsung Pay apps to enable tap-to-pay, or virtually contactless for retailers, certainly a desired new outcome of the pandemic for many consumers.

This digital payment frontier will be interesting to continue watching as it evolves over the next couple of years, for both job prospects for our students and which technologies the masses adopt.