Comments on: Competition in payments

By: 77SunsetStrip

77SunsetStrip — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 02:15:51 +0000

Worth noting that one of the ways BankAmericard (later spun off into Visa by BofA) made inroads signing up merchants in the ’60s was to substantially undercut American Express on merchant discount fees.

By: drewbie

drewbie — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:05:40 +0000

I’d still carry my wallet with me if I could pay for things with my phone. I carry much more in there than cash and credit cards.

By: bryanX

bryanX — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 02:58:29 +0000

Carriers will have nothing to do with the future of mobile payments, other than to provide the ubiquitous secure internet connection for mobile apps to do the heavy lifting.

Here’s one way to do it:
http://bu.mp/

There are other methods.

By: HBC

HBC — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:09:18 +0000

It would be nice to know there was Consumer Protection on a lot of things, ideally a real one going through more than just the motions of the Fed. But in the future you envision of piping money through mobile phones there’s more than consumer rights at issue (really? yes).

There’s the practical matter of users being on different networks and in different legal jurisdictions, which is why we have the mBlox and Obopay hybrids of this world interested in aggregating what might otherwise fall between the cracks in the system-to-system mosaic. Unfortunately, in the case of mblox, this tends to mean giving ‘em 50% of net transaction value.

Of course, that’s where a lot of the faddish Haiti Twit-Aid went to, but regular retailers haven’t got that sort of money to give away and until a better set of aggregator parameters comes along by more open competition it may or may not behoove any one carrier to offer inter-user money transfer convenience. It’s not as though AT&T or WalMart wouldn’t like to massage more money out of their respective users’ pockets, but to go from A to B would take more than either of these greedy ogres has infrastructurally invested, or intends to.

Most likely to “bridge” that gap at least within its user spectrum: iCash from Apple, or something similar but cross-carrier and slightly less snooty (but with flash) on Android from Google.

By: crocodilechuck

crocodilechuck — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 04:55:19 +0000

Felix-v good concise history of payments. In Australia, BPay has been a big success over the last fifteen years-a payment utility that has been so because it afforded each of its stakeholders (banks, merchants, customers) benefits. A lesson for the introduction of new technologies, ie RFID and WalMart……..

By: bryanX

bryanX — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:15:10 +0000

PayPal charges even higher rates than Visa/MC.

They are in need of some regulation as well.

Their code base is already set up to easily deploy mobile smart phone payments for POS transactions.

It’s actually extremely simple to do. No Telcos or Visa or MC with their fingers in the honeypot… just a customers smart phone and a couple of finger taps.

By: PierreB4

PierreB4 — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:22:30 +0000

Sweden has a mobile payment system being deployed. Telcos don’t seem to be involved directly. See:

http://www.accumulategroup.com/webb/me/c ases.jsp