Card networks’ ‘buy button’ gains ground but hurdles remain

• Key insights: The card networks’ Click to Pay e-commerce system is expanding, though there is still room for growth. 
• What’s at stake: In the U.S. where Click to Pay has not grown as quickly as Europe, banks are at risk of losing competitive advantage. 
• Expert quote: “It’s very important that banks ensure cards stay robust,”—Nick Maynard, vice president of research at Juniper Research, told American Banker.

Card networks continue to push Click to Pay to merchants and consumers, but adoption hurdles remain. 

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The movement toward Click to Pay—a secure online checkout experience designed for faster, convenient, and secure e-commerce payments—comes as card brands are aiming for near-universal adoption of tokenization by 2030. Tokenization in this case refers to using temporary identifiers to replace card numbers as a security measure, and is not related to crypto. 

Click to Pay, a universal buy button, was launched in 2019 and is becoming more popular, especially outside the U.S. In the U.S., many banks have focused more on Paze, a bank wallet launched by Early Warning Services in 2023.

Banks have an important educational role in the rollout of Click to Pay, and they’re missing an opportunity if they aren’t pushing the service, Nick Maynard, vice president of research at Juniper Research, told American Banker. “It’s very important that banks ensure cards stay robust,” he said. Cards are a good revenue stream, and banks don’t want to risk disintermediation from other payment options such as PayPal, he added. “Anything that can encourage card adoption and usage is going to be a priority for banks.”

Here’s what banks need to know about the progress of Click to Pay:

The problem that needs solving

Many consumers don’t save their cards online with merchants. A notable 72% always or often manually enter payment information at checkout. That’s according to a 2024 Mastercard report, with data fielded in November 2023. Another report from Visa, using data from late 2024, showed that around 21% of consumers manually entered information to pay for their most recent online purchase.

Manual entry is nettlesome to merchants because it often leads to cart abandonment. “It’s a huge problem,” Avin Arumugam , chief product and technology officer at payments platform Flute, told American Banker. Hence, the use case for Click to Pay.

Recent developments

Much of Click to Pay’s recent expansion has been outside the U.S. In May, Network International – Jordan, announced the launch of Click to Pay for its e-commerce merchants through Mastercard Merchant Cloud. Last month, Visa announced the launch of Click to Pay for eligible Revolut Visa cardholders, giving millions of consumers access. Also, last month, Worldline enabled Click to Pay for recurring payments.

In Europe, Click to Pay is live in 32 markets, enrollments have more than doubled, and more than 70% of users come back to use it again, according to a Mastercard spokesperson. In the U.S., 90% of Mastercard consumer cards are enabled for Click to Pay, giving issuers and merchants a strong foundation to scale from, the spokesperson added.

Several banks outside the U.S., including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Revolut Bank in the U.K., and ING in Spain, are also actively promoting Click to Pay, Dan Coates, director of product management for the merchant segment at ACI Worldwide, a payments software company, told American Banker.

Potential for future growth

Card brands continue to push Click to Pay as they move toward full tokenization. “Mastercard has committed to fully tokenizing every online transaction on our network by 2030, in turn eliminating manual card entry and one-time passcodes from the checkout experience,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “Click to Pay is central to delivering on that vision — replacing the 16-digit card number with a secure token and giving consumers a faster, safer, password-free way to pay online.”

In many ways, Click to Pay is more economical for merchants because it eliminates Google and Apple as middlemen. “It would be reasonable to think that we should see increased adoption,” Gary Stein, managing director in Accenture’s North American payments practice, told American Banker. 

“One of the holy grails for retail executives in this digital age is breaking down the friction between inspiration and purchase,” Rob Garf, chief strategy officer at Cordial, an enterprise marketing platform, wrote in an email. If the payments process is “clunky, consumers will leave the site altogether. In fact, our research has shown three strikes and you’re out. After three bad experiences, a consumer will leave the brand entirely.”

Click to Pay also shows promise for recurring payments. “One of the bigger use cases is for subscriptions and reordering, where consumers don’t need the emotional connection or detailed information to make a decision,” Garf wrote.

Challenges remain

For many payments professionals, the expansion of Click to Pay in the U.S. is more a matter of when than if. Eric Nelson, senior associate at TSG, compared the slower rollout of Click to Pay in the U.S. to EMV acceptance trends worldwide. “At the 1996 Olympics, we were talking about EMV, and it took a good 10-plus years to really take hold in the U.S.,” he told American Banker. 

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Many consumers, especially in the U.S., aren’t familiar with Click to Pay, and many merchants have yet to opt in. Consumers can enroll in Click to Pay through a participating bank, during checkout at a participating merchant, or using Visa’s Click to Pay consumer portal or Mastercard’s portal. American Express and Discover advertise the service on websites, but they tell users they can sign up at checkout. 

Another adoption challenge is the prevalence in the U.S. of Google Pay and Apple Pay. “People have a hard time seeing beyond that,” ACI’s Coates told American Banker.

Many customers are also moving toward the pay-by-bank model, Dave Scola, chief product officer at Form3, a global payments platform, told American Banker. Generationally younger consumers like to avoid credit and are more interested in methods that allow them to pay directly from their bank account. Also, many merchants prefer to avoid interchange fees, if possible, he added.