Forget swiping or inserting your chip. Consumers and small business owners alike are all about tapping—and Visa is working on new ways to make it easier to simply tap a credit or debit card to a smartphone to pay for everything from vegetables at the farmer’s market to your share of your parents’ Christmas gift. The company’s contactless payment methods have become a core part of the company’s business strategy going forward.
The company is taking notes from the growing popularity of what it calls “tap to phone,” or when a consumer taps their card to a smartphone to pay for something. The payment method has grown 200% over the past year across the globe, and particularly among small business owners who say it democratizes access to needed technology, Visa said Monday.
Whether it’s a merchant at a street market or an established brick and mortar business, tap to phone is an equalizer for small businesses, says Mark Nelsen, Visa’s global head of consumer products. Historically, merchants would need to have a point of sale terminal to process transactions. But now, all they need is their phone and an app from their payment service provider.
“When you talk to some of the small, medium businesses that have deployed this technology, you don’t usually get a lot of excitement around payments,” says Nelsen. “But with this technology, there’s real excitement from the merchant community around how it’s transforming their business.”
While tap to pay has existed for years—and Apple Pay, which lets users pay with their phones, has been around since 2014—it really took off in 2020 when consumers and businesses were more keen to adopt a contactless payment method. The company expects adoption to keep growing through the next year, especially thanks to those new features it plans to roll out and expand.
“People love to tap, so we’re continuing to expand our tap capabilities to create the best payments experiences for people and businesses,” says Nelsen.
One of these new capabilities is “tap to add card,” which enables users to add their credit or debit cards to their phone’s digital wallet with a tap. That launched globally with Apple Pay in September 2024.
Others include “tap to confirm,” which allows users to quickly okay a high value transfer, and “tap to send” and “request,” similar to a peer-to-peer payment system like Venmo but done by tapping the user’s physical card to a friend or family member’s phone.
“This concept of tapping your card to a device to make payments, just in those experiences, is so much more seamless,” says Nelsen.
Visa is the world’s largest payment processor, handling billions of transactions. As more consumers and businesses go cashless, Visa is poised to handle even more, especially thanks to its integrations with systems like Apple Pay.
Visa stock has been riding high, hitting all-time peaks over the last week. It’s up almost 30% over the past year.
