Covid-19 Impact: Accelerating Towards a Contactless Economy

The one thing that the COVID crises have shown the world, is the fact that the future holds a contactless economy for us. People are adopting digital payments and students are learning from the comfort of their homes, without attending physical classes. Citizens across the globe are practising social distancing norms and billions of people are stuck in lockdown across the globe.

The corporate world has also not remained untouched with employees working from home and governments issuing travel advisories to travellers, and telling them to reduce their travel necessities wherever possible. But, what do these factors and steps mean for the economy as a whole? Let’s find out!

What do these factors mean for the economy? 

It was the proliferation of mobile devices in India that had laid the foundation of digital payments in the country. Today, this proliferation has helped enormously in making the shift towards a digital economy and facilitating a contactless payment experience. 

Since the coronavirus spreads through physical contact, there has been an increased push to make day-to-day experiences as contactless as possible, and facilitating easy digital payments was a step in the right direction.

Today, consumers can choose from a host of payment methods, e-wallets, UPI, Internet banking, and a host of other methods. Students and employees to have shifted their day to day business to online communication platforms such as Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, etc. and leverage these platforms to stay in touch with their coursework and employers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a huge shift in consumer behaviour that has resulted in a huge boost to platforms and services facilitating contactless services. Platforms such as Microsoft Teams, a remote video-conferencing platform, is clocking 2.7 billion meeting minutes every day in the wake of this global pandemic.

Colleges and school are shut down and students are taking online classes to keep up with their coursework. All in all, these crises have compelled us to think of new ways to keep in touch with each other, while completely discarding the traditional routes that have been developed over the years.

Our reliance on physical currency was bound to be exterminated at some point in the future and this pandemic has only accelerated this transformation. This transformation could prove to be critical in witnessing the next revolution in the Fintech domain and facilitating contactless payments for almost all sections of the society.

On the whole, the COVID crises have taught us a whole lot of lessons in terms of how we conduct our everyday business. It has brought in an era of technological revolution and paved the way for a contactless and pandemic-proof payments, education and business infrastructure.

Conclusion

While the gigantic shift is still underway, there are a host of problems that we need to address. User awareness is the primary one. Ensuring contactless payments and contactless education infrastructure may be easy in metro cities, but the same cannot be said for rural India, where still, the Internet penetration has not reached satisfactory levels. The dependence on laptops of cell-phones for that matter, with a reliable and stable internet connection, is proving difficult for students who are relying on the existing infrastructure for completing their coursework. Whatever the difficulties may be, we have to ensure that the transition happens and we need to do whatever it takes.