Skip to main content

Tap-to-pay could get more capable and more complicated

Tap-to-pay could get more capable and more complicated

/

Apple Pay and Google Wallet could do more with NFC if Multi-Purpose Tap adds support for loyalty cards or additional transactions.

Share this story

Credit card reader with a message stating Tap to Pay and logos for various payment cards on a gas pump in Lafayette, California, May 9th, 2024.
Photo: Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images

At some point in the future, a new “Multi-Purpose Tap” concept will let payment cards or devices like smartwatches and phones accomplish multiple things at once when using NFC. With this in play, a customer in a store might tap their phone with Apple Wallet or Google Pay on a terminal that simultaneously checks their ID if they’re buying booze, add points to their loyalty account, pay for their goods, and provide them with a digital receipt.

Some of the concept’s goals are laid out today in a PDF from the NFC Forum, the nonprofit consortium of tech companies that guides and promotes the NFC standard and which includes Apple, Google, and Sony among its roster.

• Multi-purpose tap has the power to enhance the connectivity for each user with an NFC enabled device. For example: Simultaneous point-to-point receipt delivery, • Automatic identity verification, for example, not allowing a payment to be made for alcohol to minors, • Rewards from loyalty schemes given within the same transaction as the payment being made, • Tap and go total-journey ticketing that automatically applies the correct taxes and concessions
NFC Forum slide on Multi-Purpose Tap.
Image: NFC Forum

No more paper, just receipts on my phone? Sign me up. The forum says that this could also be used to share details about a product, like the best way to recycle it, when you use an NFC tap to pay.

However, the Multi-Purpose Tap vision the forum presents raises some privacy questions. The forum highlights how it also means you, the customer, no longer have to enter your details into a separate tablet next to a register to get your points. But it “could also be used to trigger specific, targeted marketing communications.” That’s less appealing.

The details of how retailers and payment-processing companies would use this in the real world are unknown, but making it too easy for a retailer to link activity to an individual profile can cause all kinds of problems.