Anyway though. These types of studies are becoming almost monotonous- "Young Consumers Keen [love the British] to Make the Switch to Contactless Mobile Payments" says The Independent, following up on the study from MasterCard (yup, they're beginning to share reports and almost claim them as their own. Can I do that? Can I go into work and say things like "The work that you did is correct due to the work that I would like to do!" Insight. Innovation. Impact. PYMNTS has even more interesting about the APAC regions, citing that mobile finance users could be up to 2.3B by 2015 in the APAC alone.
A lot has been happening, so let's just bullet it out....
- American Express Levi's Partner to Offer On-Demand Mobile Coupons: This is a great idea and a great move by American Express to move to the next step of mobile couponing. By making them on-demand, you not only increase customer satisfaction, but you get the bonus of additional tracking metrics (since it's an incoming action, not an outgoing one) and you can more closely monitor usage (decrease breakage). A win all around-they're calling these things "Smart Offer APIs", where offers are delivered when a card member uses a card at the merchant location to make a purchase. Best of all, the actual "savings" happen on the back-end, and the "savings" are deducted directly from the customers statement
- MocaPay Launched a Branded Payment Card Integration in Mobile Wallet: This is a big step forward for MocaPay because it allows for MocaPay users to pay using MocaPay at the POS for the first time. This is a more compelling argument than what we currently have because MocaPay is much more of a mobile wallet than many of the current payment options, allowing users to tie their payments and activity to loyalty profiles. This could be an interim step on the way to getting to a "full" mobile wallet, where consumers can connect "additional services" on the back end to an existing payment account
- Deals With Major Players Vital to Boost Mobile Payments: Interestingly enough, one of the biggest untapped markets out there us in the middle east. It says currently, one of the fastest growing sectors is mobile ticketing. Juniper Research says that they expect half a billion people to use the service by 2015, and currently these types of services are on display at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre, where they're hosting the 11th edition of Cards Middle East 2011. I'll be interested to see if anything special comes out of it...
- Former Senior Execs from eBay, Oracle and Visa unveil FreeMonee, the world's first national gift network. This national cash-gift network enables merchants to give "gifts" directly to individual credit and debit cardholders by working through their existing, participating financial institutions. They would basically be cash incentives that function like a gift card on an individual's credit or debit card. This new method seems to follow the trend of leaning toward data-mining, because the way it works is by using their new proprietary Adaptive Matching Technology (patent-pending, proprietary technology) that analyzes transaction data of hundreds of millions of card holders to match consumers with applicable "gifts" to stores that they would be likely to shop at. Pymnts.com cliams that "The AMT system is optimized to maximize consumer satisfaction, merchant ROI and network profitability." Supposedly, this system should launch in the summer of 2011
- In tangential news, the Payments Authority launched a social network called B2Bsynergy.org that directly targets payments professionals (Facebook for payment geeks like me)
- SCORE and American Express OPEN (their small merchant forum) are seeking to drive small business growth through an event series. Although I'm sure this is just part of their annual shenanigans to publicize their offerings, I've never really noticed it in the news wires before, and I think it's interesting to note only because I think it's indicative of the industry beginning to realize and really invest in the value of capturing the small business segment
- Recently, MasterCard acquired all of Santander's (Sovereign Bank) debit portfolio. I didn't even know that companies could do that....But it intrigues me because it 1.) reminds that MasterCard has been awfully quiet during all of this hullabaloo, which makes me wonder if its quietly up to something either internationally or internally and 2.) this merger seems indicative of the beginning trend of large issuers partnering with more regional banks to do promotional campaigns
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