November kicked off with MasterCard and Visa posting results for the third quarter. In summary: another strong quarter. MasterCard’s shares have risen by 50% for the year to date; its larger rival Visa Inc has posted share gains of more than 33% over the same period. So all good for 2013 thus far from the major card programmes, writes Douglas Blakey
It was a relief to receive some actual figures to pour over as a welcome distraction from what seemed like endless pitches from breathless PRs extolling the virtues of mobile card readers. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but October ended with pitches from PRs and executives from Intuit, Payleven, WorldPay Zinc, iZettle and MPayMe.
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All in the space of a two week period. There may have been one or two pitches and meetings in late October relating to mobile card readers that have slipped my mind. First things first. The readers. There are no differentiating features relating to the readers themselves. Quite why one of the PRs thought it worthwhile to try to explain in detail what the reader can do, defeats me.
Lord knows what Intuit’s customer service is like for its genuine customers, but it scored zero out of 10 with this office. Sending out a mobile reader to review and then a week later charging £94 for the privilege is akin to sending a book to review and the following week, invoicing for the book. Of the other vendors, WorldPay Zinc have a lot going for it.
The hire of Geraldine Wilson – at Vodafone she was the executive responsible for the successful roll out of pay-as-you-go mobile phones – as managing director of WorldPay Zinc shows that they mean business and are not playing at the mobile reader sector.
Research conducted for WorldPay Zinc, for example, that one in five of people surveyed admitted they had abandoned a purchase in the last year, due to the retailer or service provider not accepting card payment is perfectly credible. As is the finding that over half of consumers (54%) find it inconvenient when small businesses don’t accept card payments and 72% of people are left with a negative impression of a business that fails to accept cards.
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By GlobalDataI can believe all of that. The impending death of cash is however incredibly over-hyped. PRs – these blessed PRs again – seem to be under some misapprehension that banking journalists are so gullible to believe that cash use is collapsing and that cash might disappear some day soon. We are a long way from a cashless society. Cash remains habitual, is widely understood and is simple.
The drive towards a cashless society is making progress in a few mature republic economies – think Sweden, Australia for example.
It will be fascinating to track the winners and losers among the tech vendors in this sector.
And as CI goes to press, there is another urgent, breathless pitch from a PR about another new kid on the block: Paddle.
At least the PR was clued up and pleasant.
