Remember the days of paying for the bus with cash? Scrabbling around at the bottom of your bag for the handful of change you know is there somewhere.

Or that moment when you realise you’ve left a note in the jeans that are now whizzing around your washing machine.

Although cash isn’t quite dead, these kinds of problems are largely a thing of the past. And the pandemic has massively accelerated the shift towards a cashless society. We’re all used to paying by card now, (and younger people know nothing else), so the transition from card payments to mobile payments seems an inevitable next step.

For better or worse, our phones rarely leave our hands. It’s no surprise then that we’ve started using the same device we use for almost everything else to make payments – in fact a study found that in-store mobile payments grew 29% in the U.S last year.

The benefits are clear – whipping your phone out of your pocket and tapping it to pay for your coffee is likely to be quicker than finding the debit card in your wallet. Meaning you’re not holding up that guy behind you desperate for his oat milk latte, and the staff can serve more people throughout the day. The same applies to taxis, hairdressers, dry cleaners and anywhere in between – the time spent searching for your wallet, the card machine, or the correct change is time we can all get back.

But it’s not just time saved. Small business owners spend thousands each year in hefty payment transaction fees. Taking payments with Lopay (via mobile or a card reader) costs only 0.79% per transaction, well below the fees charged by other providers. So small businesses can save money, regardless of whether their customers have made the switch to mobile payments yet.

Although physical cards aren’t a relic of times gone by just yet, it’s clear that just as we moved from cash to card payments, we are seeing a shift from cards to mobile phones. Maybe one day we’ll look back at waiting for a card reader and inserting our card with the same nostalgia that we look at counting our coins to get on the bus…

Sign up to Lopay to start taking mobile payments today