Mastering the Mobile Wallet

Payment apps are hot. How to know if they’re right for your business—and if they can strengthen bonds with your customers

- Jill Krasny

MAYBE YOU’VE SEEN customers pay for their lattes at Starbucks using that company’s mobile wallet. Or perhaps you’ve seen them breeze through the checkout line at Wegmans buying their groceries with Apple Pay. As customers shift from standing in line and swiping a credit card to ordering ahead and tapping a phone on a scanner, mobile wallets are leading the way. While it’s hard to quantify the dollar amount transacted with mobile wallets, Parks Associates estimates that proximity payment trans actions—which require users to tap their phone at a point-of-sale terminal—generated more than $30 billion in the U.S. in 2016, a figure that’s expected to top $300 billion by 2022. 

WHAT YOU’LL GET 

Fresh & Co., a healthful grab-and-go café chain in Manhattan, launched its mobile wallet in 2014, and the number of active users “almost doubles” every year, according to chief operating officer Alex Perez. “The first year, we signed up 8,000, year two was 16,000, and now we’re at 30,000,” he says. This doesn’t surprise observers of this payment trend. “Across the board, consumer satisfaction is about 80 percent for mobile wallets,” says Chris Tweedt, a mobile-payments analyst at Parks Associates. This is because they are more convenient than credit cards, and make it easier to manage loyalty rewards.

For business owners with loyal customers, mobile wallets—and especially the rewards programs often built into them—can be a powerful way to strengthen those ties, says Chris Gardner, co-founder of mobile-wallet provider Paydiant. One reason: They put location-based sales insights and marketing campaigns within easy reach.