But Which Mobile Payment System Is Best?

For mobile payments users out there, or those who would just like to be, there have never been quite so many options for mobile payments. So trying to figure out just which of the panoply of options out there is best—let alone best for individual users—is a tough proposition. Gizmodo recently took this matter on, and crowned what it believes a king of the field.

The winner in the study was Vodafone Pay, a system which drew on the identity information contained within a subscriber’s subscriber information module (SIM) card. Since it could also make contactless payments, that allowed it to be a highly efficient and profoundly easy way to make payments.

Coming in second was Apple Pay, which alternately gained and lost points on the strength of its operations. The fact that users had to manually confirm that it was them making the purchases, by entering a PIN or using a TouchID scanner, both made the system secure and less than easy to use.

Rounding out the top five were Android Pay, Barclays bPay, and Tesco PayQwiq, followed by the contactless card system as a wild card and honorable mentions Samsung Pay and the PayPal OneTouch system, neither of which are commonly available to British users.

Gizmodo’s list is really only valid in the UK, of course, but with Apple Pay being almost tops in England, it’s a safe bet that it will be highly recommended no matter where it shows up. While most won’t have access to some of these, the “big three” of Apple, Android and Samsung Pay are all in attendance. That shows a reasonable amount of respect to the major multinational brands, and while Samsung Pay hasn’t rolled out in near as many markets as it probably should have by now, it’s still gaining ground.

In the end, we’ve got a lot of options, and the one thing Gizmodo’s list proves for certain is that users won’t go wanting for choices in this market. It’s likely that we’ll start seeing some options fade away altogether, unable to hold a market. We saw that somewhat with LG Pay, though it never really got off the ground. A new market means a lot of fluctuations, and a lot of options to try.