This post is in response to the recent Bankinter story of NFC payments at the point-of-sale without requiring SE – and the lack of any real detail around how it plans to achieve that goal. I am not privy to Bankinter’s plan to dis-intermediate the SE, but as I know a wee bit about how NFC works, I thought a post would help in clearing up any ambiguity as to how Card emulation and Host Card emulation differs, upsides, challenges – the whole lot. Continue reading
Drop Labs
Drop Labs – Skating to where the puck's going to be.
Tagged with Google Wallet …
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
MCX – MerChants reduX
MCX – MerChants reduX: Recently, I spent an hour chatting with friends of mine who launched a small business about what worked and what didn’t. When the topic veered off to card acceptance costs, the reaction was visceral – one of absolute loathe and the struggle to understand the myriad ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ of what cards to accept, and how to accept them. In the end, they had swore off Amex cards because the acceptance cost was above their product margins. I told them about Square and how it could allow them to continue taking Amex and pay a lower rate. But that had me thinking about MCX and what it could mean for small businesses. The post that follows is a collection of thoughts around MCX, why it deserves respect, and yet how it is indeed mortal and bleeds like all others. Continue reading
There and Back again – A customer journey with Paypal
I remember creating my Paypal account back in 2000 when an acquaintance of mine wanted to split the lunch tab with me, and sent me $20 via email a couple of days later. I remember hurriedly opting to cash out via check, having little trust in a newfangled payment startup. That $20 actually languished in said Paypal account (despite issuing a check that ended up never being cashed) for another couple of years before I actually did something with that money and my Paypal account. What follows is the rest of that journey. 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
Wake up, Google!
The last few weeks/months, we have all seen a glut of news and opinion pieces mourning the decline of Google, as if it were already dead and buried. I offer a slightly different viewpoint below, and a more focused one, around its mobile commerce strategy. There, I believe Google is now at an inflection point, where the choices it make shall determine if it could successfully transition from online to mobile, or whether it will resemble Microsoft in its glory days, failing to understand or monetize on the opportunities that lay before it in the early days of internet. Continue reading
Carriers: We are here to help!
MWC being in full swing, has brought a truck load of new product launches and partnerships(too many that they start blending with each other to form one amorphous blob). But what caught my eye was an announcement from Jason Donovan, an AT&T executive on how it is considering a way to let app developers pay the cost of the data traffic associated with its usage instead of passing on the burden to subscribers. AT&T believes that it will roll out this service sometime in 2013, and that there is already rising interest from companies that hope to rely on this the feature to incentivize customer adoption. I believe AT&T is right in that there are firms who believe this to be a good thing. And one among them would be Isis. Let me explain why, before delving in to why overall this has the potential to be a really crummy idea. Continue reading
Google Wallet Hacks – Why the sky is not falling
This bit of news landed on my feed today morning and left me much distraught. Every time there is the slightest murmur of a security issue around mobile wallets, the tech media and blogs – ever so informed, has to find the nearest tallest tower to shout it out from. It serves as a doubled edged sword in that it both leads to public humiliation at the town square for the brand in question, plus it further spreads FUD and instills a deep sense of mistrust towards that digitization of wallets and ends up being applied quite broadly which is quite unfair. Continue reading