As unattended retail expands beyond vending into EV charging, parking, kiosks, and other self-service formats, payments are becoming both a customer experience tool and a core operating layer. In this interview for CP Media, Lynda Clarke, General Manager UK at Nayax, discusses how cashless adoption, embedded payments, IoT connectivity, regulation, and loyalty tools are reshaping the economics of automated commerce.
Unattended Retail Moves Into the Mainstream
Unattended retail is expanding rapidly, from vending to self-service formats. Which segments are growing the fastest today, and why?
Unattended retail has come a long way from its roots in low-value vending machines. The market has genuinely transformed in recent years, as more locations move towards 24/7 self-service and consumers grow more comfortable making higher-value contactless purchases without a member of staff in sight.
Parking, kiosks and laundromats are all seeing strong growth, but for us at Nayax, the sector that really stands out right now is EV charging. Rising EV adoption means drivers want to charge in the places they already visit every day — hotels, campsites, car parks, retail destinations. The numbers back this up: in the EU, battery-electric cars made up 19.4% of new car registrations in Q1 2026, up from 15.2% a year earlier. And here in the UK, March 2026 saw our strongest-ever month for battery-electric car registrations. That momentum isn’t slowing down.
How is consumer behavior evolving in unattended environments as the shift to a fully cashless experience accelerates?
Consumer behaviour has already reshaped this market quite significantly. Cashless is now fitted to 95% of pay vending machines — which, when you think about where we were even ten years ago, is a remarkable shift.
A lot of this has been driven by changing payment habits. The average UK consumer was already making 14 contactless transactions a month in 2025, and that’s only going to increase following the FCA’s decision to remove the £100 contactless cap in March 2026. It’s a real turning point, and as a result, operators are increasingly looking for payment technology that can handle larger unattended transactions securely and reliably (including PIN where it’s needed).
Has the move away from cash reached a point of no return in unattended retail, and where is adoption still lagging?
Honestly, the conversation has moved on drastically. In the UK and across Europe, operators aren’t asking whether to go cashless anymore; they’re asking how to get the most out of their payment systems. The best-performing operators typically understand that means uncovering deeper insights, enabling smarter pricing, improving energy efficiency and delivering a genuinely better experience for customers, all while navigating complex regulatory frameworks.
From a consumer perspective, unattended cashless payments have quietly shifted from a convenience feature into something closer to critical infrastructure; not just in retail, but across transport, energy and urban public services. This is since a huge amount of consumers are walking around with only their mobile phone wallets on them — no cash at hand.
Payments Become the Core Customer Experience
What matters most for a successful cashless experience today: speed, breadth of payment methods, UX, or something else?
It comes down to what people actually want; and the data is quite telling. Research from the Payment Systems Regulator found that 95% of consumers feel UK payment systems are working well, and 92% agree they can make and receive payments in a timely way. But in the same study, 39% had experienced limited payment choice, 25% had encountered IT failures, and 22% had dealt with blocked payments.
So, confidence in the system is high, but patience for disruption is low. Once fast, reliable payments become the norm across travel, parking, vending and charging, anything less starts to feel like a failure of the service itself.
What I say to operators is: think of payments as an all-in-one solution rather than just a transaction mechanism. Take speed — faster approval at vending machines means shorter queues in busy spots like hospitals, universities and transport hubs. But when you invest in connected machines with a holistic payments offering, you get so much more: visibility into sales, stock levels and performance that reduces unnecessary site visits, cuts operating costs and opens up real opportunities for growth. With reliable, always-on payment hardware, machines can trade around the clock with minimal disruption.
How is the role of mobile wallets and alternative payment methods, such as QR, A2A, and BNPL, evolving in automated retail?
It’s worth remembering that only a decade ago, vending machines were still heavily reliant on cash. Revenue was held back by coin availability, machine jams and the operational headache of collection and reconciliation.
What really changed things, in my view, was the introduction of embedded payments. The arrival of Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) and contactless card acceptance directly within the machine fundamentally shifted the model. From there, it opened the door to mobile wallets and tap-to-pay solutions, bringing unattended payments in line with the mainstream habits people already had on the high street. That trajectory will only continue as higher-value unattended transactions become more common.
Nayax has been investing heavily in IoT. How does the combination of devices, payments, and data reshape the business model for operators, and do you see any role for blockchain-based infrastructure in this stack?
Fast authorisations, accessibility and reliable uptime are absolutely essential, but connectivity is what really allows networks to scale.
Things like remote monitoring, cloud-based updates and centralized transaction management mean operators can deploy and maintain payment infrastructure across hundreds or even thousands of sites without the cost of repeated on-site visits. Routine maintenance alone can run to hundreds of dollars per charger each year, and that’s before unscheduled repairs, diagnostics and engineer callouts. As networks grow, those costs compound quickly.
Connectivity reduces that burden considerably. Issues can be resolved remotely, and physical visits are reserved for when they’re truly necessary. For operators, that translates into less complexity, wider network reach and better utilisation across the board.
Scaling the Network: Reliability, Security, and Data
What technological barriers are still holding back the large-scale expansion of unattended retail in new markets?
There are always barriers when new markets emerge, and EV charging is a really instructive example right now.
The UK has around 73,000 public charge points today, but we’ll need at least 300,000 by 2030 to meet demand. Infrastructure is expanding fast, but with that speed comes real pressure. EV chargers need to handle growing transaction volumes while meeting rising consumer payment expectations, ensuring drivers can pay the same way they would anywhere else. In both the UK and EU, there are regulatory requirements ensuring public chargers support open, contactless payment — removing the reliance on proprietary apps and improving accessibility. On top of that, charging infrastructure operates outdoors in all weathers, so payment hardware needs to be durable, secure and consistently online.
What’s interesting is that the same payment principles that allowed vending to scale apply directly here. Embedding EMV and contactless card payments into chargers recreates that low-touch, app-free experience that made modern vending viable. Drivers tap and charge — no downloads, no account creation. Payments can’t become the bottleneck, just as they couldn’t in vending.
How do you address security and fraud risks in an environment where there’s no direct interaction with a merchant, and could blockchain-based verification play a role here?
Contactless payments in unattended environments still sit within broader rules on authentication, fraud controls and secure data handling. The FCA’s Strong Customer Authentication rules include exemptions for certain contactless and unattended terminal payments — which makes sense, given that extra checks in these environments can genuinely hold people up or create barriers to access.
That said, regulation doesn’t remove the need for strong systems. PCI standards still require payment data to be protected through robust technical and operational controls, so operators need much more than a card reader bolted onto a machine.
This is really the heart of what we do at Nayax. Across EV charging, vending, parking and other unattended environments, we work with operators on a payment layer that carries genuine operational and regulatory weight. That means helping them build payment journeys that are accessible, dependable and manageable at the site level, while keeping things straightforward for the customer.
You’ve spent years working on value-added services. How can data from payments and devices help operators drive higher revenue?
The real opportunity here is the real-time insight that payment systems provide. When operators adopt a cloud-based platform like Nayax’s, they gain full visibility and control over their machines and performance, including where their time and investment are best directed. Machine performance monitoring, revenue tracking and predictive forecasting all help operators optimize profitability and make faster, better-informed decisions.
We also take the handling of that data very seriously. Our PCI DSS-certified infrastructure and compliance with GDPR and COPPA mean operators can be confident that financial and customer data is processed securely, including in environments serving younger audiences.
Loyalty, Regulation, and the Digital Asset Horizon
How important are engagement tools such as loyalty and personalization in unattended settings, where customer interaction is minimal, and can digital assets or tokenization enhance these strategies?
Personally, I think loyalty and personalisation are even more important in unattended settings precisely because there’s no direct customer interaction. There’s no member of staff to build a rapport or recover from a poor experience, so the technology has to do that work.
There are lots of ways to approach this: voice interaction, branded promotions, e-receipt websites, multiple languages, and integrated surveys. Formal loyalty programmes via mobile apps can be particularly effective — they give customers a reason to return to specific machines, which directly supports profitability. Digital marketing tools that connect operators’ offline and online customer activity are another strong option.
How does payment regulation in the UK and the EU shape the development of cashless unattended solutions, and how prepared is the regulatory environment for digital assets in this space?
The compliance conversation is definitely broadening. Regulators and public bodies are paying much closer attention to how people pay in real-world environments, not just to the physical assets themselves.
That has a real impact on businesses offering cashless unattended solutions, who are navigating growing compliance and infrastructure pressures simultaneously. PCI DSS compliance, Strong Customer Authentication or valid exemptions, secure encryption, reliable connectivity, and ongoing fraud monitoring — these are all live requirements. Many operators are also in the middle of replacing ageing hardware as the UK’s 2G and 3G networks are phased out, which adds another layer of complexity.
What does the ideal unattended retail experience look like in 5 years, and what role, if any, will digital assets play for both consumers and businesses?
Self-service has shifted from convenience to expectation remarkably quickly. Supermarket checkouts, click-and-collect lockers, unattended coffee kiosks and micro-markets — transactions without staff are now just part of daily life. Over the next five years, the bar is only going to rise, and I think we’ll see this extend into environments we haven’t fully imagined yet.
Digital assets will likely play a role in that evolution, though I’d expect it to be gradual. Tokenised loyalty schemes could offer consumers something traditional points programmes can’t — genuine ownership of rewards — and for operators, there’s a real opportunity around settlement efficiency across large, distributed networks. But that will only land well once the fundamentals are solid: reliability, accessibility and regulatory compliance must come first. When digital assets can meet that same bar, the door is open.
