Payments: slow and shallow experiences

I tapped my card, and watched in awe as the notification pinged, almost immediately. It felt like a superpower to see the payment confirmed on my iPhone, with a categorised emoji, before I'd even taken a step away from the checkout.

7 years have passed since then, and what once felt magical is now an expectation of the norm.

To answer this, I made hundreds of transactions, through a combination of controlled experiments (paying myself) and broad real-world usage (paying a variety of real merchants).

I can now demonstrate the high-street banks' lack of performance, and why their payment experiences feel shallow.

How long does it take, on average, for a payment notification to appear?