Last updated at 14:52, Friday, 27 July 2012

Customer take-up of new payment methods such as PayPal which are cheaper to process is challenging banks’ dominance.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said people’s willingness to use new technologies showed that the existing charging regime has to change, which would ultimately drive down costs for customers as retailers’ costs reduce.

The BRC asked firms about the development of self-service tills and contactless and e-payment methods, with those in a survey taking almost 60 per cent of total retail spending.

Non-card methods such as PayPal were used in 150 million transactions worth £1.2bn last year, replacing the credit and debit cards from traditional card-issuing banks which would previously have been used to make these payments, the BRC said.

A third of retailers said they had accepted one of the emerging payment types – PayPal, Google Checkout or Amazon Payments – during 2011 with half ready to do so by the end of 2012.

The BRC said that the evolving payment methods are the cheapest way to accept payments. The average cost of processing a credit or charge card payment is 36.2p, 9.6p for a debit card, but for non-card methods includinge-payments it is just 7.9p.

First published at 14:05, Friday, 27 July 2012
Published by http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk