As mobile payments rise, consumers expect more from every checkout
Radi El Haj, CEO at RS2 said: “New UK Finance figures show that mobile payments have become firmly embedded in everyday spending, with 65% of UK adults registered for at least one mobile payment service in 2025, up from 57% a year earlier. Contactless payments also reached 19.2 billion transactions, representing 39% of all UK payments.”
“The more significant shift is happening underneath the tap. The payment experience is moving further away from consumers manually presenting credentials and towards wallets, tokens and infrastructure that can authenticate a transaction without exposing the underlying card details at every stage. The 16-digit PAN and, increasingly, the need to enter a PIN are becoming less central to the payment experience, particularly as tokenisation and biometric authentication take more of the work away from the consumer.”
“That has important implications for the infrastructure supporting payments. A mobile wallet transaction may look like a single tap, but behind it sits a chain of authentication, tokenisation, routing, authorisation and settlement that has to operate in seconds. Removing the PAN from more stages of that journey can also reduce the amount of sensitive card data exposed across merchant environments, while creating a more streamlined experience.”
“Another recent piece of research from the European Central Bank shows how quickly this landscape is developing. Mobile payment acceptance among euro-area businesses has risen from 36% in 2024 to 68% in 2026, while 92% still accept cash and 88% accept physical cards. The direction of travel is clear, but payment preferences are becoming more diverse rather than converging around a single method.”
“That puts enormous pressure on the infrastructure underneath payments. A restaurant moving from a quiet afternoon to a packed evening, a stadium processing thousands of transactions during half-time or a retailer facing a seasonal peak cannot afford delays in authorisation or failures in processing. Nobody notices the infrastructure when every payment works. They notice it immediately when it does not.”
“The industry therefore needs to think beyond payment methods at checkout. The priority should be building infrastructure that can securely abstract away credentials, support multiple payment methods and absorb enormous fluctuations in transaction volumes without the complexity reaching the customer.”
“The payment experience is becoming simpler on the surface while becoming considerably more sophisticated underneath. That is exactly why the infrastructure powering it matters more than ever.”