Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Digital Business Models—Contactless Payments

Härting, R. C.; Bilge, K.; Fleischer, L.; Landgraf, N.; Özcakir, F.; Wicher, M.

The COVID-19 crisis affected society and economy worldwide and has an increasing influence on all industry sectors. That opens up completely new digital business models and does not stop at people’s payment behavior. New payment options such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and others enable people to pay without cash. The aim of this research project is to identify what effects the COVID-19 crisis has on people’s behavior with regard to contactless payment. It will be investigated whether the participants are increasingly using contactless payment options due to the COVID-19 crisis and what advantages and disadvantages are associated with the options. Since there are hardly any studies on this topic at the current time, this paper strives to fill this research gap. For this purpose, the authors have conducted a quantitative study. The hypothesis framework is derived from literature research. The resulting study was conducted with 528 participants. Study analysis show that the vast majority of hypotheses have a significant impact on the potential of contactless payment systems. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.