- Ireland continues trend toward card, mobile and app payments
- MyTaxi and JustEat popular among mobile payments platforms
The people of Ireland are keeping up-to-date with many parts of the technologically developed world by following the trend of replacing cash with either card-based money transfers or mobile app payments when conducting transit, retail, or other service transactions.
As a result, Irish retailers have been forced to adapt to the fluctuating marketplace, with many considering implementing other payment methods to accommodate.
The most notable changes in payment trends can be observed in the popularity of apps such as MyTaxi and JustEat. These are used to pay for services where cash payments used to dominate.
Contactless card payments had previously been perceived with a general scepticism ever since being introduced five years ago, but as people become more educated and the technology sees continuous improvements, consumers are much more comfortable paying for products and services in this manner. Contactless has now been adopted on a mass scale in the country.
2016 and 2017 were transitional years during which Ireland moved towards adopting new methods for payments and money transfers, but it takes more than a few merchants to implement these to notice palpable changes.
It is predicted that offline and online spending will become much more intertwined as times goes on. This does not necessarily signal the end of cash as a payment method. But sometimes cash can make things unnecessarily complicated, which is what digital payment methods are aiming to solve.
On the other hand, paying with cash offers the anonymity no other payment method can guarantee. This is a feature that the proliferation and popularity of cryptocurrencies is attempting to address. Cryptocurrencies can be potentially problematic since their usage carries anxieties surrounding the problems of bribery, corruption, and organised crime.
Visa’s Ireland Country Manager Philip Konopik claims that cryptocurrencies and peer-to-peer money transfers through avenues such as Facebook will become increasingly more popular in Ireland over the next few years, highlighting international money transfers platforms such as Revolut.
“I believe that there is a place for these and different currencies will create different frameworks for them to operate in to make them more palatable for Financial Institutions (FIs) and banks to start trading with them. But, from a consumer perspective, you'd almost have to think of it as a commodity today. Revolut have found a solution which is palatable to them, for example. There's no reason why another bank couldn't do the same thing,” he said.
Koponik went on to predict that in the next two-to-five years, he believes Ireland has the infrastructure to prove itself worthy as a region leader in the remittance and international money transfers markets, revolutionising the payments sphere as we know it.
