Category Archives: Mobile payment

Mobile Payment Future Is Tied to Services

Guest Post by Nick Nayfack, Director of Payment Solutions, Mercury Payment Systems

Consumers are already using their smartphones when they shop. They just need the incentive to take the next step to making a purchase with their phone. According to Google, some 79 percent of consumers today can be considered “mobile shoppers” because they use their smartphones for browsing for product information, searching for product reviews or looking for offers and promotions. Today’s merchants see their customers browsing their store with smartphones and know that mobile marketing is no longer an option, it’s an imperative.

There is a clear opportunity to target avid smartphone users, as well as provide merchants with the ability to turn their point of sale system into a marketing engine simply by capturing their customers’ phone numbers. By creating a point of sale environment where processing becomes prospecting, mobile and alternative payments become a natural extension of the convenience and value that merchants and consumers are looking for. Not only can consumer use their phones in store to gain product information or exclusive offers, they can skip the checkout line by paying with their phone.  In this environment, mobile payments gain adoption because of the valuable service it provides to both the merchant and the consumer.

What is it that is driving merchants to adopt mobile point of sale systems (POS) – doubling their implementation in the past year – and consumer rapid adoption of smartphones – while mobile payments has yet to experience the same growth curve? The slow speed of adoption can be tied to two gaps in the current payment landscape: convenience and value. Merchants are adopting mobile POS systems because of their affordable pricing, the ease of use, and the ability to tie value-added services like loyalty programs and gift options to their customer’s checkout experience. Consumers are looking for more value for their money and more likely to sign up for opt-in marketing at the cash register or loyalty programs if they feel like they are getting something in return.

Where is the value in Mobile Payments today?

1. Information is Still Key

Consumers are using their phones now mostly to find product information, restaurant reviews, and discount offers.  90 percent of smartphone shoppers use their phone today for “pre-shopping” activities. The most common are price comparisons (53 percent), finding offers and promotions (39 percent), finding locations of other stores (36 percent) and finding hours (35 percent).  In contrast, consumer in-store purchases from a mobile device are still in the minority (~16 percent), but show promise for fast and exponential grow.  As such, if you want consumers to use your mobile payment application, there must be a tight alignment with other frequently used mobile applications (i.e. mobile search.)

2. Remember Your Basics

Key players in the mobile payments space need to make better UX by applying principles learned from the web many years ago: mobile-specific design, clear calls to action and one shopping experience across all platforms.  Beyond the UX, there needs to be clear and repeatable value to the consumer. Special offers or incentives could be paired with your current purchase history to make one-click purchases attractive from mobile devices. From a historical perspective, Amazon introduced this concept several years ago in the e-commerce world with links that provided suggestive purchases based on the buyer’s current purchase (e.g. others that bought this book, also bought the following). While m-commerce has different considerations such as limited time and high distraction of users, there can be some lessons learned from the past.

3. Find Today’s Value

POS developers will succeed today, and in the future by helping merchants to obtain and analyze information about their business and customers. This requires coordinating with an acquirer or processor that has rich historical data to help analyze transaction history, and other data. In this way, merchants can then personalize the consumer experience for new cost benefits or improve operations for cost savings.

Lastly, as mobile evolves, new data points will provide richer context (e.g. location, social context, sku data) and merchants will have even more reference points to deliver a personal consumer experience. In this way, personalization is the key value that is coupled with convenience.

Nick Nayfack

Nick Nayfack is the director of product for Mercury Payment Systems. He is responsible for developing best practices in mobile commerce with industry peers in order to help enable merchants and consumers to navigate technological “ease-of-use.” Nick is also a member of the Electronic Transaction Associations (ETA) Mobile payments committee.

Mozido Partners with Savvis to Increase Cloud Infrastructure Offerings

Mozido, LLC, the cloud-based, white label integrated platform of mobile payments, commerce and marketing, today announced a multiyear agreement with Savvis which will provide Mozido with access to Savvis’ cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions to deliver the performance, scalability and security needed to meet the everyday demands of customers in the mobile payments market.

“Mozido’s agreement with Savvis underscores our continued commitment to meeting the diverse needs of a global customer base,” said Greg Corona, CEO and President, Mozido. “By leveraging Savvis’ leading cloud and hosting infrastructure, we will enable customers in the mobile payment ecosystem to quickly implement and scale as their businesses grow, while ensuring the quality of their IT systems and operations.”

With a global footprint, Savvis manages one of the largest and most sophisticated hosting infrastructures in the world. Through this relationship, Mozido will offer its customer base a suite of Savvis solutions including:

  • Access to premium, PCI-audited data center facilities with multiple
    levels of security and redundancy to ensure maximum availability to
    customer applications;
  • Skilled data center management professionals available 24 hours a day,
    seven days a week;
  • Cloud infrastructure that meets end-to-end enterprise requirements for
    application security, privacy and performance;
  • Advanced security options with dedicated locked cabinets, on-site tape
    vaulting and highly secure off-site vaults to meet the most stringent
    security requirements.

“As the mobile payments market expands, Savvis has become a preferred hosting partner for leading players in this space,” said Varghese Thomas, global head of financial services, Savvis. “Backed by our secure global data center footprint, Mozido’s mobile payment and commerce solutions offer the scale and stability to meet the diverse needs of the global payments base.”

Battle for Control of the Mobile Wallet: Sorting out Players,Technologies, Strategies

Research and Markets  has announced the addition of Javelin Strategy & Research’s new report “Battle For Control Of The Mobile Wallet: Sorting Out Players,Technologies and Strategies to Win” to their offering.

Mobile payments and purchasing at the physical point-of-sale have experienced little adoption in the U.S. marketplace despite abounding innovation in mobile and payments technologies. Control over the consumer’s preferred mobile wallet will be critical to the new business models that will develop in this ecosystem and the tremendous wealth that will accrue to the winners.

The battle for control of the wallet is in its initial stages, with many players just entering the field, jostling to grab early market leadership, and changing alliances and positions rapidly. A successful wallet will have to find a winning proposition for consumers, merchants, mobile network operators and financial institutions. This report will provide an update on how products have moved, where we can expect these products to be in the future, which primary technologies are being used at the POS (NFC, cloud, and bar code), and how wallets can maximize adoption.

Highly innovative but new vendors to the payments space, such as Google, the mobile network operators (the Isis partners in particular), Square, and Apple will need to position and partner differently than incumbent companies, such as Visa, MasterCard, card issuers, and alternative providers like PayPal. This report will also address consumer perception of different providers and why Visa and PayPal lead as preferred consumer wallet providers.

Primary Questions

– What is a digital wallet, and why is it important?

– What are the differences among NFC, cloud, and bar code mobile wallets, and what are their advantages and disadvantages?

– Who are the major competitors in the mobile wallets space, and how are they different?

– How are incumbent payments competitors transitioning into the mobile wallet space?

– Who are new entrants in payments , and what are their advantages and disadvantages?

– Which mobile wallets do consumers prefer?

– Which consumer segments should wallet providers target?


i2c, KargoCard Partner for Prepaid, Mobile Payments, Loyalty Solutions in China

i2c, Inc., a payment processing technology company, and KargoCard, a Shanghai-based prepaid service provider, have partnered to deliver prepaid, mobile payment and loyalty solutions to merchants in China. i2c will provide payment processing services to enable KargoCard to offer a robust suite of products within China.

“KargoCard is an established leader in their market with a rapidly growing distribution network, strong management team and an impressive client list,” said Amir Wain, CEO of i2c. “Their drive to revolutionize the Chinese payments industry aligns perfectly with i2c’s commitment to bring innovation to global payments.”

In a recent report by Mercator Advisory Group, China was estimated to be the world’s largest prepaid market in terms of market potential. With several high-profile clients like Beard Papa, Happy Lemon and Cloud Nine, KargoCard is set to grow exponentially in this market. To support KargoCard and i2c’s growing presence in the Asia-Pacific region, i2c is building out a new data center in Shanghai.

“Our tremendous growth and aggressive expansion plans require an established processing platform that offers superior flexibility and scalability. i2c’s platform provides this, as well as a rich feature set that will allow us to better serve our customers,” said KargoCard CEO David Suzuki.