For the first time since the advent of credit cards, there are new ways to pay that don?t involve cash, check or plastic. Most are built on top of the existing payments system, but ? courtesy of that hand-held computer in our pockets and purses ? offer new vistas for both consumers and tech entrepreneurs.
?It?s clear that the mobile phone is the device that people are going to be using in the future to pay,? said David S. Evans, chairman of the Global Economics Group. ?It?s not going to be a plastic card.?
By 2017, Forrester Research estimates, Americans will spend roughly $90 billion using a smartphone or other handheld device, a more than seven-fold increase from the amount spent in 2012. The firm?s figures include mobile remote commerce; mobile peer to peer payments and remittances; and mobile proximity payments.
Even if its estimate is too optimistic ? as projections in this arena have tended to be ? the pace at which startups are emerging is already head-spinning: Stripe, PayNearMe and WePay, among more than a thousand others, fueled by billions of dollars in venture capital.
For consumers, mobile payments mean greater convenience and better security. For merchants and banks, they present new opportunities to track you and target sales pitches and rewards to you. And they give tech entrepreneurs a low-cost entry point into the multi-billion dollar payments pipeline.
So why aren?t already living in a post-plastic world?
In part, because everyone involved in the chain ? merchants, card issuers, traditional processors, tech innovators and consumers ? is looking to maximize how much money they keep at the end of the day. Sometimes, the interests of two or more players align, but often they don?t.
Sorting it out ? via market forces and regulation ? is likely to make for a period that?s exciting, bewildering, messy and frustrating. And right now, we?re at an inflection point, where what emerged as a handful of novelties is becoming a new way of doing business.
That?s evident in the changes the incumbents are making. Banks, payment networks such as Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Amex, and the tech companies that serve them, such as FIS and Fiserv, are scrambling to keep up.
?In 2014, you?ll see larger payments entities scramble to accelerate the pace of their innovation to catch up to these smaller and more nimble competitors,? PayPal President David Marcus predicted in a blog post.
?Meanwhile, smaller players will scramble to achieve the scale and experience needed to compete in a global business,? he wrote. ?As a result, billions of dollars will be at play in the payment industry, and 2014 will be a year of game-changing disruption.?
Last year, PayPal launched 58 new products, partly because of new threats, according to a recent New York Times report.
And earlier this year the e-commerce arm of eBay announced PayPal Beacon, a Bluetooth device that reads payment information from a smartphone. With that device, someone like a restaurant server would no longer have to take your card away from the table to complete a transaction.
That?s in addition to a partnership with Discover, which lets folks use PayPal in the checkout line at some of the nation?s largest merchants. PayPal has also recently acquired progressive payment processor Braintree, which has regulatory approval to move money nationwide.
It?s marketing its services to mobile-based innovators such as Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit, which facilitate transactions between individual sellers and buyers of, respectively, rides, lodging and doers of household errands and other tasks.
And we haven?t even talked yet about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which operate in a parallel payments universe, completely outside the existing system.
To be sure, some of the innovations won?t stick.
?Innovation and disruption is an inherently inefficient and lofty process,? said Matt Harris, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures. He harkens back to the first wave of dot-coms, with its rash of failures.
?We are at that now, at least in consumer financial services,? he said.
But some of the experiments will succeed, and at least a few will change the landscape for all of us.
Source: MCT Information Services
