Free Now survey: In-app card payments, preferred by both passengers and drivers due to limited interactions

To protect their health, more and more people are choosing to limit unneeded interactions with others and are opting for safer ways of doing so in many aspects of their daily lives. Thus, digital payments have grown significantly in all business sectors, with the acceleration of digitization in companies and people’s preferences for this payment method that limits exposure to viruses and bacteria. According to the latest survey by Free Now, the European leader in multimodal mobility services, passengers using the app to travel around town have adopted in-app card payments to a greater extent than before.

41% of Free Now partner drivers surveyed have noticed changes in passenger payment behavior over the past year and a half, while 80% indicated the shift from cash to in-app card payment as being the most important one.

From a health point of view, 85% of drivers indicated card payment as the safest and most efficient option. For 65%, cash payment is not considered hygienic and another 25% say that when they have to collect the payment in cash they feel forced by the circumstances to interact with passengers, even though they do not want to.

45% of respondents consider paying by card as modern and efficient, 13.5% prefer it because it helps them avoid interaction with the customer, and 8.5% like the fact that the amount is fully covered and they do not have to worry about change.

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“Free Now encourages in-app card payment and we are seeing more and more users, both among partner drivers and passengers, choosing it for health safety reasons on one hand, but also from an efficiency point of view. In addition, Free Now is constantly investing in the development of the app, and in-app card payments are carried out with maximum security. For the first rides a new customer makes with Free Now and pays for by card, the app checks whether the passenger has the money in their account and locks it when the order is sent, and it is then unlocked and returned to the account if the passenger cancels the ride. After the first few such interactions, the money will only be taken from the account at the end of the journey”, says Daria Marinescu, Head of Marketing Free NowRomania.

When it comes to paying for the ride with cash, 75% of drivers say they have encountered a situation where customers did not have enough money to pay for the ride in full. Another 31% say there have been cases where they have had to stop during the ride to change money to give customers change.