Walmart last week became the latest retailer to join the trend toward mobile payments when it debuted a new system in all its Missouri locations.
The system is an addition to the Walmart app and can be used with any kind of credit or debit card and any kind of smartphone.
"People forget their wallets, but most people don’t forget their phones," said Farai Madzura, manager of the Walmart Express in downtown Columbia. "These days we use our phones for everything."
Walmart isn't the first retail chain to adopt this kind of mobile payment system. Starbucks uses a similar app, and many stores accept payments from apps such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Wallet.
Schnucks, a supermarket chain with a store on Forum Boulevard in Columbia, has been accepting Apple Pay and Google Wallet as payment for roughly a year.
"We believe that these apps are extremely secure," Schnucks spokesman Paul Simon said. "It's another payment option we can offer for the customers' ease and convenience."
These apps use "transaction specific dynamic security codes," which means the user's actual card numbers are never shared. Instead, a unique code is used to identify every purchase made.
The new Walmart system keeps the encrypted card information on file, but it is protected by a personal passcode, Madzura said.
"None of your personal or high-security information is ever on there," Madzura said. "If you lost your phone, for example, you won’t have to worry about someone just being able to charge whatever on your phone. It’s also behind a highly secure firewall that they have set up."
Data the Walmart app and others like it collect about users' purchases can be used for marketing and other business functions, although Walmart promises in its privacy policy that the information won't be sold to other companies.
"We need to know what these retailers are doing with all that information," Matt Tollerton, vice president of e-commerce at Central Bank, said. "The data is very valuable."
He recommended that people read the terms and conditions of the apps before deciding whether to use them.
"We want to let our customers pay how they want to pay," Tollerton said. "I just want to make sure those security measures are being met."
Despite the excitement, only about 10 percent of Central Bank's customers use a mobile payment app, Tollerton said.
"The whole payment system is changing pretty radically, and it’s been doing so over a long period of time," Mary Wilkerson, vice president of marketing at Central Bank of Boone County, said.
With the introduction of technology such as the Walmart app and self-checkouts, Walmart is focused on advancing in ways that make stores run more efficiently, Madzura said.
"It’s not anything that’s ever going to replace people."
By: Anna Maples ( Columbian Missourian).
Photo: Engadget.
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