By now you’ve probably realized Starbucks doesn’t want to wait for the contactless payments and is already allowing its customers to pay for their coffee with nothing but their phone. Savvy coffee drinkers obviously dig what the company is doing since it has thus far processed more than 42 million mobile payments, which are available to users in the Canada, US and UK.
Under Starbucks’ scheme, customers use their phone to load money on to a digital Starbucks Card and then present a 2D barcode to pay at the register. The barcode is then scanned and money taken from a user’s account.
This success prompted Starbucks to “name” mobile payments as one of 10 core digital businesses for enhancing its relationship with customers. In fact, a few weeks ago, the company promoted Adam Brotman to the chief digital officer (CDO?) role, the first position of its kind at Starbucks, consolidating all of its digital businesses under a single digital ventures umbrella.
We’re pretty confident Brotman knows what he’s doing and that soon enough we’ll be reading (and writing) about additional mobile innovations coming from the popular coffee chain
