If you own a smart fridge like the one Samsung builds, you don’t need to guess what food you have at home. You can just ask your fridge. While the Internet of Things (IoT) has made everyone’s lives a little easier, it has also helped create a new type of payment method: IoT payments.
Everything connected
In a world where everything is connected, the way of paying changes. In the future, your washing machine will order the washing powder when it runs empty. Your fridge will order milk when it runs out. Your car will pay for the fuel you’re putting into it, without you reaching for a card or smartphone.
“Your machines and vehicles won’t be able to handle payments automatically all of a sudden, but it’s on the horizon,” CCV’s Guido Lamers says. “There’s a slow shift taking place, it won’t happen quickly, but it’s definitely on the way.”
Industries are working to create machines that can sell customers products and with IoT becoming more commonplace, we’ll start to see manufacturers take leaps of faith when it comes to payment. Connecting product payment to IoT will make the entire payment cycle easier to manage.
The effect on the average business
Why exactly is this trend becoming popular? IoT allows companies to start the point of sale much earlier in the cycle than previously available. In fact, it allows them to skip the customer journey altogether, making their product a mainstay in the consumers’ life.
Consider a car, which the average European spends 84 minutes of his or her day commuting in. That was previously lost time, where businesses and consumers couldn’t interact with each other during the day. But technology could allow the vehicle itself to make various purchases.
For example, the vehicle’s systems could also manage payment for tolls or even help a passenger order a takeaway for when they get home.
At its core, the infrastructure to facilitate these invisible payments already exists; IoT is just opening up different avenues as to how customers can use it.
For most companies, that’s a win-win situation and a potential boost in revenue and for the consumer, convenient and fast.