As someone who joined the payments industry over 25 years ago as a product manager with American Express for paper Travellers Cheques, things have come a long way to enable travellers to travel around the world with ease.
For those looking to explore the world outside of their home country, dealing with foreign currencies to pay for goods and services can be challenging. Not only do you have to locate currency exchanges, you also need to calculate exchange rates and figure out how much you’ll actually need. Even communicating with local merchants and service providers in other languages easily becomes a barrier. You’re then left with wallets and pockets full of coins and currencies that you are not likely to convert back, or it may take a while before you use it again. And let’s face it, will you ever find where you put that money at the end of your trip?
Over the last 4 weeks I have had the opportunity to travel across 5 countries, for both business and a vacation with my family. I left the US with $20 cash in my wallet, a couple credit cards and my mobile phone.
4 weeks later I still have the $20 in cash, I may have pulled out my card once or twice. The rest of the trip I have used my phone to pay for everything from hotels, taxis, transport, tips, food, theatre shows, cooking classes, spa services and even the bathrooms – you name it.
Payment using your phone is like a universal language with merchants, from big brand stores to independent business owners – you just point at your phone when you want to pay, and they nod yes. Language barrier – solved! The seamless process of simply tapping my phone throughout the trip enabled me and my family to do everything we wanted along the way.
At Thredd this is the type of customer experience we can help support. Whether it is enabling contactless payments, provisioning payment credentials into mobile wallets or tokenisation of those credentials for better security. These are just some of the means we can help issuers create a better customer experience for their customers when they travel and in everyday life.
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