Mobile World Congress is over for another year. Reports are mixed about how many ‘new’ announcements were made but several pundits were not too impressed. I did not go myself, preferring to watch the reports and attempt to manage the fire hose of announcements that were the Twitter feeds. Several things struck me. First, the ‘other vertical markets’ that we keep saying will use mobile technology to innovate their offerings were actually there. If you had said that Ford was exhibiting at the show four years ago, you would assume it was a gimmick, not
Read More »American Express is experimenting with Twitter as a payments (and loyalty) channel. The company has been rather quieter than its rivals, who have been associated with giant experiments such as ISIS, but they are busy innovating. An article from BillingViews’ friend Jonathan Jensen caught my eye, as he tracked his shopping trip, evaluating how mobile friendly various stores were. Being Jonathan, his first stop was Starbucks, where he paid for a coffee with the Passbook based Starbucks Card, which, combined with a Foursquare check-in, gave him £5 cashback on his American Express account. As Jensen
Read More »by which I mean this …. As you might remember, I am somewhat skeptical about ISIS, the joint venture between the Big Boys of communications and the Big Boys of payments processing. A recent article in Mobile Commerce Daily reported that customers in Salt Lake City were following merchants after they had left the store and that 65 percent of customers were using the ISIS digital wallet five or six times a week. All good, and even more promising, lots of customers are using their cards on the transit network. Excellent, I thought. Brilliant. Plus, it
Read More »Looking back through the payments predictions for this year I had an ‘Oh No, here we go again’ moment. This is the year of mobile payments, ‘they’ say, or ‘this is the year of mobile wallets’ and even ‘this is the year that Apple finally put NFC into an iPhone’. I do not think so – on any count. My mind went back to the early days of the Internet (not that long ago), to a Billing conference in Paris (one of the ‘good old ones’). I was c0-chairing a session on how disruptive the
Read More »In the happy holiday turmoil you might have missed PayPal President, David Marcus’ blog in which he predicts that the “NFC payments debate will slowly die in 2013.” “Is tapping a phone on a terminal any easier than swiping a credit card?” he asks. You might think that we would agree wholeheartedly. NFC has been one of the major frustrations of 2012. The great ISIS experiment, based on NFC, was delayed again, possibly through the cultural challenges of large established companies trying to do anything even faintly innovative. And, as David Marcus says,
Read More »By Guest Writer Kelly Martin Mobile Payments from a Banking Perspective The mobile wallet will fundamentally change commerce… yet it remains unknown who will lead this revolution. One thing is fairly certain; a bank won’t be at the front of the charge. Banks will take a page from Charles Darwin and follow an evolutionary approach to mobile payment. This means narrower product launches in the mobile payment space (think Barclays PingIt or PayTag). Rather than go the way of Google Wallet, it is more likely banks will focus on more “silo-ed” products. And unlike
Read More »A report by IDC posts the big $1 trillion number for mobile payments, but the author, Aaron McPherson, a self confessed NFC sceptic (there should be a club), is quick to point out that a) this is a drop in the overall transaction totals – which are close to $50 trillion and b) he was surprised at the signs that NFC might yet be a major part of the game. With NFC functionality now being bolted into chips, then maybe a few of us may yet have to eat our hats. Report: mobile payments
Read More »NFC is like an itch you just cannot stop scratching. We (OK, I) get very cynical about it as I watch the Really Big Players delay trials because they are so worried about it not being 100 percent right on Day One that jobs may be at risk, departments might be reviewed. The most risk averse companies on the planet are trying to innovate and it is not a recipe for speedy, successful roll outs. So we get cynical, we criticize, we do surveys that show that 65 percent of operators do not actually see
Read More »ISIS, the NFC mobile wallet that is about to tested in Salt Lake City and a couple of other cities in the US is still – about to be tested. According to Mobile Payments Today, there are several reasons for the lack of anything happening. Reading between the lines, it comes down to the difference in culture between large telecoms and banking organisations and start-ups. The delays are caused by extra testing of SIM cards, worries that people outside the cities might be able to use the service, but not in the way that they
Read More »Conferences are like politics. They seethe with conflicting objectives and pressure groups. One group wants to listen to their peers, straining for the insight or nugget that will save them money, make them money or get them promoted. Another group wants to sell stuff to the first group who want to listen to their peers not have stuff sold to them. The analysts are in there pitching too, as are publications, information providers, vendors, partners, trade associations, educational institutions. It is a nightmare and like politics, a truly independent conference at which everyone is happy
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