The Acceleration of Cashless Payments in Unattended Retail: Podcast featuring Jason Yeung, Adaria Vending Services and Elyssa Steiner, USA Technologies

Jason Yeung is the Managing Director at Adaria Vending Services Limited (“Adaria”), a vending machine services company, based in Canada, started by Mr. Yeung and his co-founder Tommy Chan in 2010. It evolved from a school project at the University of Waterloo, where both were studying engineering. USA Technologies’ VP of Marketing, Elyssa Steiner, spoke with Mr. Yeung this past summer, as part of our “UR Tech Insiders” podcast. The pandemic was in full swing, and the discussion focused on his company’s journey to deploy cashless during COVID-19.

“Our company’s premise is based on bringing technology into a market that has historically been slow to adopt it,” said Mr. Yeung. Adaria started with USAT’s Seed Cashless products seven or eight years ago. At the time, the costs for converting to cashless were much higher so they only rolled out on a handful of machines. The uptick in cashless adoption was slow, but Mr. Yeung has seen a significant shift over the past few years. 

Everything now is going cashless in Canada with the pandemic most certainly accelerating adoption. It’s a big shift – going from cash only to cashless only. Whereas five or six years ago 90% of consumers would pay with cash, today that number has dropped to about 70%. It may be too early to tell, but Mr. Yeung predicts a significant shift towards cashless, particularly as businesses start to see worthwhile ROI.  The upside includes lower capital expenditure and greater efficiencies. 

In the 2020 “Future of Unattended Retail Study,” conducted by USAT in cooperation with PYMNTS.com, the company found that consumers may prefer to use credit cards when they can, but not all machines accept them. USAT is leading the charge in helping businesses of all sizes make that transformation. The clear message from Mr. Yeung is, “don’t be afraid to change. You’re losing sales if you’re not implementing cashless.”

To hear more about Mr. Yeung’s thoughts on the pandemic and acceleration to cashless, please tune in to our podcast: https://urtech.libsyn.com/episode-02-how-covid-19-is-accelerating-cashless-payments.