TableSafe Talks Trends In Hospitality Payments

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the coming year and what their ideal payments system looks like.

TableSafe‘s CTO Michael Weaver and COO Steve McKean, spoke about payments innovations in the dining and hospitality space and how mobile platforms are changing the way the industry players are talking about payments.

PYMNTS: WHAT ARE THE BIG TRENDS YOU’RE SEEING IN PAYMENTS IN 2015?

SM: The fact that everyone is considering mobile platforms is an interesting dilemma, but it’s not that easy. I think there’s a path to the movement to mobile, but currently I think it’s going to be difficult to take a device away from the table.

MW: When you look at the adoption rate of mobile, nobody has a higher adoption rate in hospitality than Starbucks. Yet, a huge percentage of people don’t use it. But if they were to say, “From now on, we’re only taking mobile” today, they’d serve fewer than half of their customers. And that’s still an amazing adoption rate.

Mobile is great. It makes it a great opportunity, whether it’s for the millennials or anyone else who wants to use that really flexible and quick functionality with your smartphone. But you still can’t leave the rest of them stranded.

PYMNTS: WHAT ARE YOUR PREDICTIONS FOR PAYMENTS FOR NEXT YEAR?

SM: I still consider mobile to be at the forefront of all the technologies. We’re going to see point-of-sale-systems going online so that there’s only an interface from the restaurant to those things. It’s sort of the hospitality industry catching up to the rest of the world that’s adopting technology so quickly.

The migration of EMV has a huge impact on refocusing everyone toward safety and security. Because everyone loves technology, they want speed and the ability to essentially lower the hassle factor or friction.

MW: Hospitality is running last as far as the adoption of the new EMV rails. I think you will see it trail retail — specifically big box retail. I think the end of 2016 is when you’ll see hospitality really engaging with meeting these new requirements for EMV.

PYMNTS: WHAT DOES YOUR IDEAL PAYMENTS SYSTEM LOOK LIKE?

SM: What I hope it becomes is that regardless as a consumer of how you want to pay, it’s a seamless process, and you get to pay that way, effectively and safely.