Demonstration of payment confirmation issues with QR code payments

This video demonstrates the payment confirmation issues that customers often experience when using mobile (QR-code) payments.

As of 2020, there are more than 450 local mobile payment solutions worldwide. Most of these systems make use of QR-codes and suffer from this issue.

In the first sketch, we show a scenario where the merchant's payment confirmation message does not arrive within a reasonable time. This causes considerable frustration for both the customer and the merchant. The second scenario shows how AuthGate delivers a payment confirmation immediately to a payment device (BodyPAD) when the payment has successfully completed.

Synchronous payment confirmation (in fact any synchronous messaging) require both the sender and receiver to be available when the message is sent. The requirement of immediate payments systems to be available 24x7 is meant to guarantee this simultaneous availability by ensuring that all parties are available at all times. In practice, participants are likely to suffer periods of unavailability from time to time, which would result in degraded service. In this case, the payer would suffer the most inconvenience, even though the problem may be with the payee’s institution.