Those subjects – mobile payments, e-commerce and NFC – continue to fascinate the industry. But the fact is, they don’t need to be considered separately from cards – quite the reverse.
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They are the areas into which card payments are moving at an extraordinary pace. A great many vendors in these emerging areas (not to mention the telcos and tech firms that want to play in financial services) will gleefully say the card is dying a death. And of course, if you are talking about the form factor, I guess they have a point – although even those don’t seem to be in any immediate danger.
However, the fact remains that those new form factors and interfaces rely on the the networks, processes and infrastructure that facilitate card payments. As such, it all needs to be considered together.
As a sidebar, EPI is developing its own identity beyond the world of alternative payments – focussing increasingly on clearing, interbank and corporate payments.
Don’t fear the disruptor
The danger is that we being to see the world of alternative payments in terms of threat, rather than opportunity. To think that Barclays’ launch of Pingit – a mobile person-to-person payments app for UK smartphones – somehow presents a challenge to the credit card is clearly irrational.
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By GlobalDataThe reality is that the consumer needs more electronic payment options – there are still gaps in the market that are not being catered for currently. The important thing now for the card issuer or acquirer is not how to ‘adapt and survive’, so much as how to view their business in context – seeing where everything fits together, and being realistic about the position each product occupies in the consumers’ wallet.
The fact that Barclays very quickly made Pingit interoperable with any UK bank account is obviously a way of marketing the bank’s services to its competitors’ customers.
But it is also recognition of the fact that any such product requires a critical mass that no bank can find without going beyond its own customer base. Collaborating with the competition is a very familiar concept in the transaction banking world (not to mention other industries), and retail banking probably has some catching up to do.
