Community

PAYM does for most banks what Pingit did for Barclays. PAYM offers quick and easy payments from bank mobile apps.  But most consumers are unaware that this service exists. A pity.   

...so...the valuation of the Monzo business is 555million times earnings...

...do we really believe in Unicorns??...

..I'm confused...Zap/ Zapp/ZipZap/Znap.... all of these payment schemes appear to be emerging at the same time....

....which of the following are VocaLink and Frank Zappa promoting (an excellent co-branding partnership if I ever saw one) :

http://www.zapzap.mobi

https://www.znappay.com/en_GB/

https://support.zipzap.com/home

http://zappayments.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.zapp.com/en/worldwide/location-germany.html

...Starbucks provides a useful "niche" closed loop stored value mobile payment app....

...as a consumer, how many of these closed loop schemes will I actually sign up for? - a handful, no doubt, at my favourite retailers - if they offer sufficiently attractive loyalty schemes to justify my downloading their app and loading value....

...but will I load value by card (and keep the card schemes in business) or directly from my bank account?

...and where do Starbucks keep their $2bn in float?  Correct.  In a bank account...

...niche stored value accounts and/or wallets may take a small proportion of my spend, but the vast majority will be from my bank account - facilitated by card, or directly from bank account, courtesy of mobile, ACH and Faster Payments (in the UK at least)...

...Telcos are generally 'dumb pipes', despite their efforts to insert themselves into the payments value chain....

...the card schemes have a vested interest in resisting any downward pressures towards a 1p transaction charge....

...to make mobile payments ubiquitous, what we will see is innovation from key players who are already connected to every bank, merchant and consumer in the country....very few organisations match that description....watch this space...

Alexander....thanks for another very entertaining blog... :)

I would comment further...but do we have an NDA in place?...

Phil

An important differentiator between iTunes and PayPal as payment mechanisms (irrespective of their relative market shares) is that iTunes is fundamentally a closed loop payment mechanism (underpinned by other payment services such as Visa and MasterCard) selling a fixed catalogue of digital downloads, whereas PayPal is a more open loop payment scheme seeking to increase its openness. Let's wait and see if iTunes turns open loop any time soon... Philip Harrison

Great commentary, Alexander. While Visa and MC do offer far more than just network management (eg. regulation, arbitration, global branding etc), the ice on which they are skating in the world of mobile payments is getting thinner.. Philip Harrison

Mobile payments at the retail point of sale is the next challenge for banks to maintain this "match made in heaven"...

Plenty of non-bank payment providers are already looking to break the status quo...

The banks, Visa, MasterCard and the usual suspects still run retail payments, but the power of Mobile is opening up new possibilities...

It will be interesting to see what proportion of "mobile payments" still involve a bank account or card payment in the transaction flow, ie. if an account is funded by bank or card payment, then banks will not be disintermediated.  We should differentiate between a "mobile initiated" transaction which may still involve a bank or card transaction, and a mobile payment which does not....the bank vs. non-bank / /telco/scheme/Apple/Google battle continues.... :)

Philip Harrison, Managing Director, Clairmail Mobile Solutions

Mobile Banking and Mobile Payments