The end of swipe and type

Payments have evolved in countless ways throughout history.

Today, a handful of once widely-adopted methods persist as vestiges of a bygone era — in person, the physical swipe, and online, the need to key in your payment credentials each time you make a purchase.

In the new era of digital commerce, swipe and type are on the outs.

The tap is evolving for next-gen sellers and consumers.

Tap to pay has been widely adopted in markets around the world. Building on the tech’s success — and the success of others like it, including Tap to Phone — the power of the tap is growing to meet consumer’s and merchant’s changing needs.

For instance, the creator economy has given rise to a new class of micro-sellers and sparked widescale adoption of digital technology. To make it easier for these outfits to become sellers, Visa is testing a range of new services — from tap to add card, tap to authenticate, and tap to receive funds — that let anyone with a debit card and participating app easily start to receive payments.

From the POV of banks, wallets and issuers, Visa plans to offer a complete SDK, creating specialized tokens so that a debit or prepaid card can become payment acceptors securely. 

From a buyer’s vantage, these new services work the same as tap to pay anywhere else — just tap a card or mobile wallet to a seller’s mobile device and payment is complete, card-to-card, as easy as any other P2P transaction.

Later this year, Latin America will be the first region to see next-gen taps, with rollouts in select markets to follow in 2025.

Click to Pay eliminates the need for typing in payment credentials online.

Anyone who has ever wondered, “why do I need to input my payment credentials again?” when shopping online will be delighted to hear “you don’t.”

By integrating Visa Payment Passkey and Click to Pay, Visa is making online payments as simple and secure as a contactless payment—and eliminating the need to manually enter credentials or use guest checkout.

With Click to Pay¹ as a pre-activated standard feature of your Visa card being introduced around the world from later this year, nearly any need to manually enter personal information online disappears from day one.

For merchants, Click to Pay enables a cloud-based card on file solution for receiving authenticated payment credentials. And in a world where many online baskets are abandoned by customers, mainly due to friction in the checkout journey, merchants can hope to see more carts make it to “paid.” Visa has launched Click to Pay Drop-in UI, a new network and gateway agnostic solution that enables merchants and their payment facilitators to deploy Click to Pay faster and with less cost and effort to integrate.

Pilots in Europe have already shown faster checkouts and 3x fewer fraudulent transactions. Also live in Australia and Brazil, Click to Pay will roll out in other select markets later in the fall.

If early results are any indication, the days of swipe and type are numbered.

Learn more about contactless payments and Click to Pay.

¹ Visa cards issued by participating banks will include the Click to Pay icon. The Click to Pay icon is a trademark of EMVCo, LLC and used with permission of the owner.