Mastercard's "Commerce For Every Device" Program set to change the way we shop

Who would have thought your range of everyday, wearable objects could be turned into seamless payment options?

According to research released by Mastercard, Australia is well on the way to becoming a cashless society.

Galaxy research commissioned by MasterCard, found that the majority of Australians (58%) believe more cash will be removed from general use within the next five years. Two thirds of them are already carrying less cash, with more than half of us now carrying less than $50 in cash.

Some Australians would even be happy to see coins phased out sooner than paper (42%), marking them cumbersome and annoying to carry.

It begs the question though: how to buy that chocolate bar, coffee or lotto ticket if you don’t have any cash handy?

The research was not coincidental: with more and more internet-connected items appearing, or about to appear, on the market – fitness bands, jewellery, clothing, watches, car key fobs, kitchen fridges, as well as mobile phones – Mastercard is teaming up with a network of product suppliers to add payment functionality to items consumers are already using or wearing.

Mastercard’s Commerce for every Device program is set to change the way we shop and pay by providing a method that requires very little thinking and pre-planning. The bottom line here is that we don’t wake up in the morning and think about what we are going to pay for today. We wake up in the morning and think that we are in desperate need of coffee, we’re running low on milk and we must see the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie. For consumers, it’s not about the payment… it’s about the experience the payment makes possible. And that is exactly why MasterCard is on a mission to eliminate the boundaries between how we shop and how we pay.

Of course, those who are susceptible to impulse buying may need to exercise even more self-restraint than they currently do…

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Mastercard proved at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that virtually anything that’s internet-connected can be payment-enabled. Its new Commerce for every Device program is being rolled out in the USA this year and Australia will surely follow.According to Mastercard, the point of transforming connected devices into commerce devices is not for people to use every device they own to pay for things, but instead to give them the option to pay with the device(s) that best fits their personal lifestyle. For instance, a payment-enabled ring could be used to pay a taxi fare to a restaurant, Mum can forget fumbling around her handbag for her wallet and pay with her car key fob, your fridge can be used to order groceries, fitness trackers and smart watches can pay for anything without slowing down the healthy exercisers among us – the list is growing all the time.