As Easy as "Buy": Frictionless Payments

Taken from an interview with Chris Teso.

Chris Teso is the founder and CEO of Chirpify, a platform that allows businesses and consumers to make transactions directly through social media, such as Twitter and Instagram.

I see the future of payments and the future of commerce as totally frictionless. It will be seamless to the point where the act of paying actually disappears. You’ll be able to reply to a social media post with a verb, such as “buy”—that’s conversational commerce. There will also be geo-location commerce, where you’ll be able to pay for your coffee automatically, just by walking out of your local Starbucks with your order.

You’ll never have to actually do the act of paying, and I think that’s the future across the board. Payments will just disappear.

Building Better Branding

Another thing we’re seeing with our platform is the ability for something to go socially viral. Your friends will see that you’ve purchased something from Best Buy over Twitter, or that you’ve donated to Make-A-Wish Foundation over Twitter. That has a viral snowball effect. You’re more likely to buy things that you see your friends buying.

If you look at brands and social media, a brand is essentially a person on social media, and has to act accordingly. These brand representatives are forming relationships with people. They have dialogue with individuals now and so it’s truly one-on-one. The affiliation with a brand is just becoming stronger because of this. Brand affiliation is going to be huge. I think social just strengthens that, and I see that remaining true going forward, as well.

At the moment, this type of frictionless payment is mobile, but in the future, there’ll be other methods as well. You’ll be wearing Google glasses on your head and you’ll be able to pay for things just by looking at them. I think that’ll happen in the next five years.

I absolutely think cash will become obsolete. It’s just a matter of timing. It’s too clumsy of a payment method. You need to carry it around with you, it needs to be an in-person payment, and you need to stand in line. I think you’ll see lines disappear so that you don’t have to actually wait in line to pay. Checks will become obsolete as well. Hopefully, that’ll happen next week.