mobile payments Archives - Page 3 of 3

Evolutionary cycles in the payments system

The publication of the Reserve Bank’s Conclusions for its two year Innovation Review is shaping up as the catalyst for a new round of structural evolution in the Australian payments system. Payment participants have been set a challenge: establish a better long-term payments platform. Doubtless, effective coordination of industry participants is needed to meet the challenge. Nevertheless, it will be good old-fashioned competition that delivers the new products that ultimately benefit customers. Bluntly, new payment systems only take off when schemes and participants work out how to use them to offer stuff that customers want, and will pay for.

Context is everything

I recently had the rare and valuable chance to take a deep dive into someone else's payments pool. Such comparisons are always refreshing, not to mention instructive. The Canadian Government has appointed a Task Force to review the Canadian payments system, and the Task Force has embarked on a series of intensive workshops with senior people from across payments – financial institutions, schemes, corporate and government users, merchants, consumer groups and others. They kindly invited me to participate in a 3-day workshop that ranged widely over the future payments landscape as they are seeing it in Canada. This was, I have to say, an impressive effort.

Not m-payments again!

Mobile payments must be the most heralded innovation of all time. We have been talking about it for 10 years or more, and still don’t have a reliable definition, let alone a clear, widely-accepted process flow. Mobile payments' can be: - A text/SMS direction to a stored value service; - A transfer or top-up of airtime (air minutes) between mobile accounts; - A charge on your phone bill; - A contactless (near field communication or NFC) card transaction initiated from a mobile device, either by a chip that resides inside the phone or a sticker attached to the outside; - An internet payment executed from the mobile using any number of web-based services; or - An app-driven service for 3- and 4-G phones using a range of wireless connections. All of these are in operation, somewhere in the world. Do we need them all here in Australia? Probably not, but in the vibrant world of retail payment innovations, that's probably the wrong question. Rather, we might ask "which one(s) can win in an open, competitive marketplace?"