For most of the history of unattended payments, taking money without anyone on site has meant one thing: a physical terminal fixed to the machine, be it a vending unit, parking meter or amusement game. That is starting to change, and the software providers building these systems will feel the change before anyone else.QR codes and contactless payments are emerging as credible alternatives to dedicated terminals. Two things are driving it: the cost of deployment, and the public’s increasing comfort paying with their phones. Neither answers the question that matters most, whether a method built for convenience can be made secure enough for a setting with nobody around to spot when it goes wrong.The cost case is hard to argue withTake a partner running 50,000 amusement machines. Ripping out whatever is there and buying 50,000 payment terminals is a huge capital investment. Use QR codes or NFC beacons instead, and the cost to deploy or to update is a fraction of that. In industries where margins are thin and device counts run into the tens of thousands, that saving often decides whether a rollout is financially viable.This is no longer a fringe option; it is reshaping how vendors think about unattended payments. We are already seeing real growth in QR-based payments, particularly in the amusement sector.Lower costs explain adoption. They do not solve the harder problem: trust.Convenience is not the same as trustHere is the catch. The very thing that makes a QR code cheap, that anyone can print one and stick it on a surface, is what makes it risky. The RAC has reported that fake QR codes stuck to UK car parking machines have risen by 1,300 per cent over the past three years. The method is simple: a fraudulent code is overlaid on a legitimate one, the customer scans it expecting to pay, and the payment is quietly redirected. The same trick is turning up at charging stations. In a staffed shop, someone might catch it, but at an unattended machine, there is nobody to catch it. And the customer often does not realise until the money has gone.As a rule, the farther a payment device is from a person, the more vulnerable it is to fraud. Pay-at-pump is the obvious illustration, one of the largest sources of card fraud, because nobody stands beside it. UK consumers are among the most comfortable in the world with contactless and QR payments, but trust is easy to lose and slow to win back. Getting this right means a tamper-evident design so that a code cannot be quietly overlaid, secure routing so that a scan can only reach a legitimate destination, and sufficient consumer education so that people know what to look for. The aim is convenience, with a cautionary tale built in, for partners and consumers alike.One method will not cover every environmentThe mistake would be to treat this as a single problem with a single answer. A busy pub, a remote roadside charger and an unstaffed hotel lobby could not be more different in how they are used or targeted. An unattended pool table in a bar full of people carries a low fraud risk. A charger on a road in the middle of nowhere is another matter: go QR-only there, and you are inviting someone to stick something on top. That site wants a big, tamper-proof terminal that simply sits there and keeps working.So the solution varies, whether the answer is an app, a QR code or a physical terminal, and the security requirements vary with how unmanned the setting is. This is where it matters who an ISV builds with. The point is not to back QR over terminals, or contactless over either. It is the flexibility to deploy the right combination of terminals, QR, and NFC for each environment, rather than forcing a single approach everywhere. The provider who offers that range and makes each method safe is the one worth partnering with.Who wins from hereThe direction of travel is clear. Unattended payments are moving beyond the terminal, the cost case will keep drawing more verticals in. Contactless now accounts for around three-quarters of UK debit card transactions; when a payment shift takes hold, it tends to go all in.But this transition will not be won on price alone. It will be won on trust.The providers that balance flexibility, cost efficiency, integration, and security will be best positioned to define the next generation of unattended payments No#digitalpayments Conn ByrneExecutive Director for Integrated PaymentsPayroc21 Jul, 2026