Poll: 8% of North American Retailers Will Adopt Bitcoin in 2015

An American survey conducted by the Boston Retail Partners, suggests that 8% of North American retailers are planning on accepting Bitcoin within 12 months, and 5% within 1 to 3 years.

Boston Retail Partners' annual POS/Customer Engagement Benchmarking Survey, polled more than 500 top North American retailers in November and December 2014, to gain insight into their planned initiatives, priorities and future trends.

The report indicated that Apple Pay and Paypal, will lead the payment market in 2016, with 30% of the respondents having plans to adopt the former, and 18%, the ladder.

Apple Pay is designed to utilize tokenisation during mobile payment transactions, and had been working with credit card issuers to provide merchants with device-specific tokens.

Apple Pay's popularity primarily relies on Apple's iconic brand with is backed by many faithful followers. However, the number of retailers able to accept the payment method has been limited by a scarcity of payment terminals that can accept contactless payments.

Among the other findings, it was indicated that payment security was among the top priorities for retailers in 2015 with end-to-end encryption and tokenization as hot topics.

End-to-end encryption use by retailers will increase by 151% by the end of 2016. Tokenization, which allows a unique card transaction data to be converted into a token, enabling retailers to remove sensitive information from the network, will increase by 145% by the end of 2016.

Other top priorities include real-time retail, implementing a unified commerce platform, customer-facing technology in stores and mobile point of sale.

The retailers that responded to the 16th Annual POS/Customer Engagement Benchmarking Survey were among the biggest players as 95% of them generated US$100 million or more in annual revenue.

The survey is likely to reflect the plans of the biggest retailers in North America, which drive a large share of the transaction volume.

Released in October 2014, Apple Pay is a mobile payment and digital wallet service by Apple Inc. that allows users to make payments using their iPhones or iPads. 

Following its launch, it was reported that most of major US retailers had been avoiding the service and planning their own mobile payment app called CurrentC.

Developed by Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), CurrentC is a mobile payments platform that utilizes a smartphone app and a digital wallet. CurrentC utilizes tokenization and works through QR code scan.

CurrentC expanded its private pilot through 2014, and is expecting regional and national rollouts in 2015. 

MCX is a consortium of major US retail companies that includes 7-Eleven, Alon Brands, Best Buy, CVS Health, Darden Restaurants; HMSHost, Hy-Vee, Lowe's, Michaels, Publix, Sears Holdings, Shell Oil Products US, Sunoco, Target Corporation and Walmart. 

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