4 ways to pay when you wake up in 2025

My take on the future of payments and our digital world is to think up a really absurd situation and how it could be solved.

So, here’s the problem. You woke up in hospital 2 days ago, and your doctor has kindly informed shocked you. “It’s now 2025. Buy a coffee; it’ll help you wake up. Now clear out of my hospital.”

You find your family and collect your belongings. Your bank has sent you a new Visa card (as your last 4 expired while you were out). Your family treats you to some gadgets – a new phone, smartwatch, hoverboard.

As instructed, you venture off in search of caffeine. You’re discharged from hospital and drift your way into a Future-Cafe to purchase a Future-Latte. You get to the tills and suddenly, a problem strikes. How do you pay? It’s the future now, you have more options! Decide quickly – the cashier is waiting and you risk your coffee becoming tepid.

Figure 1: This cashier is judging your archaic payment method. He asks the inevitable question; “where have you been these last 10 years?” How awkward.

1. Option 1: Cash
   There is no way in this day and age that you are going to grapple with a handful of shrapnel. It was bad enough 10 years ago – you know that if you go for the coins section of your wallet, silence will fill the café with the sound of disappointment. You could hear a penny drop.Oh look, a penny has dropped. One of yours. Now you’ve got to pick it up. Look at the faces in the queue! Hear the tutting in the air. Smell the disappointment.
2. Option 2: Use your card
   You know that this is a low-value transaction and putting your card into the reader would be too slow. But you recall the predictions that the acceptance and popularity of contactless was going to keep rising like a balloon filled with helium. You liked it in 2015, so, in 2025, your chances are good that it’ll be accepted by both the terminal and society. You remember feeling awesome paying contactlessly before. It’s a satisfying touch and beep.But, it’s ‘the future’. Surely there are cooler ways to pay now. Using contactless now would be like getting out an iPhone 6 from your pocket. That’s so 2015!
3. Option 3: Pay by wearable.
   What an idea – you can carry your hoverboard in one arm, another arm free to tap your superfast smart-watch against a contactless reader – and then you can grab your coffee from the counter in one fell swoop of your wrist. What style you have.
4. Option 4: You’ve already paid.
   You’ve planned ahead. You were fiddling on your new Future-Phone or Future-Watch and you noticed you could order and pay in advance. With one tap. All you’ve got to do is kick up your hoverboard, stroll into the shop, put your sunglasses on and collect your coffee. Sit down – relax – done. The Doctor advised you not to over-exert yourself or get stressed, and you haven’t.

A thoroughly horrendous and awkward 2025 situation solved with a little advice from me. Surely our archaic payments will have moved on? Isn’t Option 4 such a dream?

Just like pre-ordering your purchases from stores, you could collect your Future-Coffee from the moment you walk in. You are relaxed, and the queue thinks you are awesome. Look at them all, faffing to pay and collect their coffees. No problem for you.

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Dan Herridge is a second year apprentice in Business Operations. Straight from college into Visa Europe, he’s got a fresh and passionate view on payments. He still gets a bit excited when he realises he can use his contactless card.