Movement to digital receipts at both the point of sale and online has lagged, but there are benefits to moving away from traditional billing.
Not only will it conserve natural resources by reducing paper, but it will also provide better and more actionable data to dramatically enhance the relationship financial institutions have with their consumers.
Digital receipts, which are accessible through email address, have been around for a while, but have not realized their potential due to lingering privacy concerns and pain points around data collection and ineffective archiving.
But the technology is changing to make these practices more secure and reliable, and this innovation will support seamless processing for digital receipts. It will also improve access to billing information, making it as simple as viewing transactions on bank websites via desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile wallet. The digital receipt can be more easily stored in a secure repository for expenses and tax receipts.
Additionally, digital receipts can generate new fee income via interchange for the issuer. And the greatest value will be in data mining. Behavioral analytics and predictive analytics can create opportunities in understanding your customers, providing services and incentive marketing and other elements of personalization.
Digital receipts can also improve personal financial management. Personal inventory applications will be robust and management of our finances and purchase will take on a 360-degree view.
Digital receipts can be a game changer similar to chip cards, which also were met with slow adoption. But there was an incentive to shift financial responsibility to the merchant which ultimately succeeded to justify the expense to accept adaption of this new payment model. Today, these chips are a commonplace in the payments processing models and the same should happen for digital receipts.
