Toronto Film Fest: Lights, Cameras… New Payment Tech!
Introduction
The Toronto Film Festival unfolds — “unspools,” perhaps — in its namesake city every fall, and has become the unofficial kickoff to “Oscar season,” for payment tech where buzz and critical acclaim can help launch a film on its march through awards season.
This year, for example, films like the Robert Redford-starring Truth, about the fall of Dan Rather, Johnny Depp as a legendarily cruel Boston gangster in Black Mass, and Matt Damon in the lost-in-space opus The Martian, are already creating nominating buzz at the fest. But you may ask, have you accidentally come across the Indiewire blog instead of AVPS’s blog, which offers you the latest tech and finance news you’re familiar with?
Visa Showcasing Innovation at the Festival
Why Visa, “in its 19th year of sponsorship of the Toronto International Film Festival, will showcase innovation and activation worthy of the red carpet.”
Quoting a Canadian VP of marketing for Visa, who explains in this Marketwired overview that “similar to stepping into a theatre, our onsite demos at the heart of the Festival, at Roy Thomson Hall, offer guests the ability to be transported in a fun way to experience the future of shopping.”
In other words, Visa attended the festival to demonstrate to festival attendees and the press how the world of payments is likely to change in the near-term future, a future already set in movies like The Martian.
Exploring Future Payment Technologies
We’ve already told you about using Visa Checkout, to ease the experience of your customers while shopping on your website. In Toronto, Visa kept taking ease-of-checkout, and ease-of-payment, even further.
One highlight, according to the PaymentSource website, was a “a prototype of a car designed to initiate payments, the first step in a five-year plan of changing the way motorists pay for gas and other needs while in transit.”
But the article notes that the development of driverless car technology allows for the driver to do other things, including ordering food and gas in advance of the car’s arrival.
Immersive Online Shopping and Future Challenges
Marketwired describes it as follows: “By 2020, they estimate that more than 250 million vehicles worldwide will incorporate some form of embedded connectivity.” Visa’s Connected Car will showcase leading-edge payment technologies while keeping busy on-the-go consumers in mind…The immersive experience demonstrates Visa’s vision of the future where consumers can seamlessly make many of their purchases without leaving the car.”
Visa also showcased an immersive online shopping demonstration, enabling festival patrons to step in and experience a virtual shopping environment surrounded by 8-foot screens. Attendees can choose between a Parisian-style bakery, complete with romantic music, bright colors, and beautiful pastries, or an old-style Country Western shop, with country tunes and wood accents. Consumers will navigate their way through the stores and select their purchases by touching the screens that surround them.”
Some interesting questions still apply, Payment Source notes, such as “if a motorist purchases fuel before arriving at the gas station, it’s not clear which category the sale would fall under. If the motorist buys fuel before crossing into another region to receive the fuel, there is a question of which location’s taxes apply.”
Which could be the future version of the battles over internet sales tax.
Embracing New Payment Options
And as noted, the aforementioned Visa Checkout — available in the here and now.
To find out what other payment options are available, from e-checks to upgrading for the imminent arrival of EMVs, contact your AVPS Rep today. And feel free to pass along any good viewing tips!
