Big news today, with Chase entering in to a 10 year expanded partnership with Visa to create a ‘differentiated experience’ for its merchants and consumers. I would warn anyone thinking “offers and deals” when they hear “differentiated experience” – because I believe we are running low on merchants who have a perennial interest in offering endless discounts to its clientele. Continue reading
Drop Labs
Drop Labs – Skating to where the puck's going to be.
Filed under Innovation …
GoogleWallet & Citi – Dance with the one that brung ya…
At midnight yesterday, Google sent me an email on how the new GoogleWallet update will now allow me to store my “Citi MasterCard” online. As other Google Wallet aficionados may recall (Bueller..? Bueller..?), Citi was the lone holdout in Google Wallet’s journey to the cloud and its race to conformity. Though to the untrained eye the Google Wallet app experience was mostly uniform irrespective of the card used to pay at the point-of-sale, behind the scenes, if the Citi MasterCard was used, Google had to do things one way versus another way for the rest of the brood. Continue reading
Let’s talk about Fraud
I am in Vegas and I am fascinated by my room key. This is not the usual “insert in to the slot, wait for it turn green or hear it chime” key cards, these are “tap and hold to a door scanner till the door opens” RFID key card. It is befitting the event I am about to attend – Money2020 – the largest of its kind bringing together over 2000 mobile money afficionados, strategists and technologists from world over for a couple of days to talk about how payment modalities are shifting and the impact of these shifts to existing and emerging players. Away from all the excitement of product launches, I hope some will be talking about one of the major barriers for consumer adoption towards alternate payment modalities such as mobile – security and fraud. Continue reading
Isis, It’s not you…It’s your business model.
It’s good to be back. Quick update, in case you missed it in three different places: I am now focusing on Mobile Payments and Banking as part of Experian’s Global Consulting Practice, which offers me myriad opportunities to see up close why banking and payments in particular remain spectacularly oblivious of the creeping threats of disruption. But today, I couldn’t have found a more better topic to wet my parched throat than the story of the comeback kid – Google Wallet. Continue reading
Moving Beyond Lip Service – Mobile Wallets & Under/Unbanked –
Everyone and their uncle are tripping over themselves in a race to launch a mobile wallet or at least talk about an intent to produce one in time. Judging by the number of initiatives out there (or soon to be), it would seem that unbeknownst to me, there is a direct correlation between kickstarting adoption and the number of choices available to a consumer (higher the number of choices, quicker the adoption). If there is, then do point it out to me. Continue reading
Allow me to make you irrelevant
Seeing how Apple’s negotiating stance is with Cable and Content providers for Apple TV & how Google did the same w/ Issuing banks, which pretty much amounts to : “Allow us to take over your relationship with your customers” and “Let us repackage your offering” and finally “Sit still while we turn you in to a dumb pipe”, I gotta ask – Is this a case of Disruptors becoming dumber or Disruptees becoming smarter? I mean, everyone on the planet has read Clayton Christensen’s book by now. Who just sits there and waits to be made irrelevant anymore?
Vinod Khosla on Retail & Emerging Payments
It was Vinod Khosla’s Cliff notes on “What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial” that turned me on to Dr. Saras Sarasvathy’s brilliant paper and other works on effectual reasoning vs causal reasoning. Likewise, he is prescient in his post on Techcrunch about the areas in mobile and internet today that are silent performers. And alongside the well known areas and ideas such as Big Data, Data Reduction, Internet of things, I found the following section(s) that I have reproduced below: Continue reading
Google Wallet, Meet me at Camera 3
I really didn’t intend this to be my next post on the DROP Labs blog. I was not planning to write about Google Wallet – again. I have an unhealthy obsession towards it, evidence of which can be found here, here, and here. After the last one, which chronicled my On the road experiences, I pretty much decided not to write about it for a while. There were other things I wanted to write about – Issuer strategy on mobile wallets, Ongoing turf battles between Platform providers/Manufacturers vs Carriers, and then it happened again. Continue reading
On the road with Google Wallet
I rode about 900 miles in the last four days, cutting across Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey to be together with my family for Christmas. I figured this would be a good time to put my new Galaxy Nexus and the Google Wallet app through its paces. Following are my impressions from it, which as a whole was very cool and satisfying. But (and there is always a but..) it also brought to surface some serious handicaps, which though not Google’s fault, could bring its wallet initiative down like a lead balloon. Continue reading
Trouble brewing for Google Wallet
I believe in Google’s capability to actually pull off mobile payments. I believe they do get it. With all its initial failings, its misplaced loyalty towards NFC and the existing payment rails, I believe they truly have a shot at fixing payments and closing the loop in local commerce. Let’s look at what is going right for them: Android is fast becoming the dominant ecosystem on mobile, with over 200 Million devices so far, and 550k activations happening each day. They have made Android a force of nature, that is now slowly eating away at Apple’s market share. They have a mobile wallet initiative out at front, at least more than a year before the closest competitor they have – in Isis. They have had some notable successes with retailers (for e.g. Gap) and has partnered with NJ transit for payments. Formidable partnerships with Citi, FirstData and MC should be all that is enough to prod more issuers in to joining Google Wallet. Despite all this momentum, Google Wallet does not seem to be having a good day so far. Continue reading