Merchants Tap Open Banking to Expand In-Store Payment Options Amid Self-Checkout Boom

From self-checkout lanes and kiosks to fully autonomous stores, unattended retail is gaining momentum around the world.

With this retail experience, merchants are able to accommodate a broad range of customer preferences while cutting back on labor costs and serving more customers in a shorter period of time.

In fact, according to a PYMNTS report on innovating the retail checkout experience, 85% of retail customers surveyed considered self-checkout faster than waiting for a cashier, while 60% of shoppers said they preferred self-checkout to interacting with a human cashier.

The February Retail Tracker, a collaboration between PYMNTS and LS Retail, also revealed that 66% of retailers are investing more resources to expand convenient payment and checkout options they offer customers.

It’s an opportunity Oslo-based FinTech Neonomics is tapping, recently launching its online checkout solution in Finland, after offering it to eCommerce merchants in its home base of Norway.

In the announcement, the company’s Head of Product Nils Christian Roscher-Nielsen added that the new checkout product is going to “take open banking to the next level,” allowing businesses to add open banking to their “payment options using just a few lines of code.”

The open banking provider added that Finnish retailers can now integrate the open banking-powered payment solution, enabling customers to “take advantage of the benefits account-to-account payments have to offer — lower transaction costs, fewer intermediaries, faster settlement, and tighter security than other leading forms of payments.”

Bypassing the In-store Checkout Process

Another increasingly popular cashierless checkout tool which runs on customers’ mobile phones is scan-and-go technology, which tracks items picked in real-time and allows customers to pay for them on their smartphones as they exit the store.

The technology saw a huge boost at the height of the pandemic, when social distancing rules were in place, and has caught on rapidly since then due to a rise in the number of mobile-assisted shoppers.

In fact, PYMNTS data shows that 79% of consumers shop with phones in hand, either to compare prices or brands, or to read or write their shopping lists.

For retailers, scan-and-go can reveal how long consumers spend inside a store or provide a customer’s trajectory in-store — key store data that a self-checkout does not offer and that can be harnessed to improve the layouts of their stores, for example.

And as the PYMNTS’ Retail Tracker noted, 77% of shoppers are more open to patronizing a retailer if this scan-and-go payment option is offered, mainly because it indicates that shopping speed is prioritized above all other factors.

Amazon, pioneer of automated retail solutions, has taken it up a notch with its Just Walk Out cashierless checkout technology, fitting it into several of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores across the U.S. and in the U.K.

Here, there is no scanning required once customers scan the app to get through a turnstile at the store entrance. Technologies such as computer vision, shelf weight sensors and ceiling cameras are used to keep track of items added or removed from a shoppers’ virtual carts, and once a customer exits the store, Amazon charges their account and sends them a receipt.

But while the technology has not had the disruptive effect it was expected to have in the retail space, Amazon’s plans to expand the technology to additional clients and new markets indicates the opportunity it has to become a major third-party tech enabler for retailers.

For example, it was announced in December of last year that Amazon will be installing its Just Walk Out capability at a non-Amazon grocery retailer for the first time.

At the time, the deployment at Kansas City’s Community Groceries was said to allow a faster, more-convenient service for its customers, offering a more innovative experience to the traditional trip to the grocery store.

“I, like most people, have a very full schedule, and grocery shopping is a tedious task for me,” Alyssa Groenig, director of sales and marketing at Community Groceries, said in a statement, per the report. “This new experience will enable me and all of our guests to shop efficiently and be on our way, with no checkout lines and no hassle.”

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