Tap to Phone Goes Mainstream: What Acquirers Learned in Year Three

SoftPOS, accepting contactless cards on a commercial off-the-shelf phone, spent years as a pilot-stage curiosity. In this episode, Tapwell's product lead and an acquiring executive talk about what changed once real merchant volumes arrived.

The economics finally work

The first theme is cost. A dedicated terminal carries hardware, logistics, repair and replacement costs that small merchants often cannot justify. When acceptance is an app download, the acquirer's onboarding cost for a micro-merchant drops sharply, and so does the merchant's commitment. The guests note that this changes churn dynamics: merchants who try it and stop cost the acquirer far less than a returned terminal.

PIN on glass and higher-value transactions

Early SoftPOS deployments were capped at the local contactless limit because there was no secure way to capture a PIN. The PCI Mobile Payments on COTS standard changed that by giving a security framework under which PIN entry on the phone's own screen could be assessed. The guests discuss the design choices involved, from scrambled keypad layouts to back-end attestation, and why merchants value being able to take the occasional larger payment.

Attestation as an ongoing service

Unlike a terminal, a phone is a general-purpose device the merchant also uses for messaging, social media and games. The security model therefore relies on continuous attestation: checking device integrity before and during transactions, and monitoring the fleet so that a compromised device can be switched off remotely. The product lead describes this as running a security operations function, not shipping an SDK.

The conversation ends with a surprise: some of the fastest growth has come not from micro-merchants but from large enterprises equipping delivery drivers, field technicians and store associates with tap-to-pay on devices they already carry for other work.