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Reading The SEC Filing Tea Leaves: What To Make Of New Visa/Square And Amex/Costco Details?

As a business reporter, nothing is more relaxing than sitting back with a pile of freshly-filed SEC documents and digging in. But two different filings this week—related to Visa/Square and Amex/Costco—may have raised a lot more questions than they answered.

Let’s set aside the numbers for the moment. Visa has a slice of Square and has had it for years, as the cardbrand has previously disclosed. There was never a need to disclose the exact size of Visa’s investment or the equity stake because Square was privately held at the time of the investment and it certainly wasn’t material to Visa. That forces the question: Why disclose the numbers now?

Visa Adds New Level 4 PCI Requirement, As The PF Attractiveness Gets A Lot Stronger

In a late holiday gift for PFs everywhere, Visa has upped the requirements for PCI Level 4 (small businesses) merchants. Specifically, as the end of January 2017, those small merchants “must use only Payment Card Industry (PCI)-certified Qualified Integrators and Reseller (QIR) professionals for point-of-sale (POS) application and terminal installation and integration.”

Although few would argue that using trained and approved vendors to do any POS work is not a good idea, merchants are already feeling that the burdens of getting and staying PCI compliant are too high. Given a PF’s willingness to take on all of the PCI aggravation, that offer just got more attractive to Level 4s.

How Flexible Is The PF Model?

The strength of any payment model is not merely how well it performs for merchants, but also how elastic it is in terms of being relevant to many kinds of companies and geographies. That is the topic for this week’s PaymentFacilitator.com podcast, with guest Todd Ablowitz, president of Double Diamond Group.

Ablowitz pointed to a recently-profiled company called RunSignUp.com as a good example of how flexible the PF model can be. The PF model lets merchants and software companies seamlessly integrate payments “without this artificial wall between the payment gateway and the merchant account,” Ablowitz said. “This removes many of the barriers. Banks move slowly and they have a lot of bureaucracy.”

Ford’s Mobile Wallet TipToes Into IoT Payments

When Ford rolled out its mobile wallet this month, it took to heart the concept of contextual payments, focusing on paying for parking from within the vehicle as well as leasing alternative vehicles. But it’s view of mobile was using a smartphone, rather than making the payments automobile-embedded. Although iPhones may weigh much less than two tons, few Apple Pay transactions will work at 80 MPH.

“FordPass, part of Ford’s transformation into an auto and mobility company, aims to do for car owners what iTunes did for music fans,” Ford said. “Launching in April, FordPass reimagines the relationship between automaker and consumer. Membership is free—whether you own a Ford vehicle or not—by registering online.” *Sigh* It’s not a good sign for business when Visa talks about integrating payments in cars and Ford thinks it can accomplish anything with a mobile app on someone else’s hardware. It owns the cars and that’s where its customers are. Why not place the payments apparatus right there in the car’s dashboard, in a place where rivals can’t reach?

Patent Wrap: Why Limit POS Communications To Payments?, Wonders MasterCard

This week’s wrapup of the latest in payments patent applications and patents issued.

MasterCard: Why Limit POS Communications To Payments? In a U.S. Patent application filed by MasterCard on Jan. 14, the card brand envisioned using POS data connections as a more flexible communication system, with messages going “to an entity that is neither a payment account issuer nor the transaction acquirer.”

Sports Event PF Running Between Processors

Payment Facilitator RunSignup.com is all about trying to take the complexities out of managing running events. It’s service and products include means to track times, tracker runners during events, assist with registration and creating customized sites. Making races easy is one thing. Making payments easy is, well, a much more uphill rocky path.

When the company started in 2009, they solely used Braintree to process transactions. As of March 2015, they added Vantiv and it’s that Vantiv relationship that turns them into a traditional PF, said RunSignup.com CFO Kevin Harris. The company finds the terms and capabilities of Vantiv more to its liking—referring to its customers, Harris said “We’d like to funnel them all through Vantiv, candidly”—but there’s a reason it needs to continue to offer both.

Can Starbucks Pull A Payments Pied Piper With Musical Mobile Money?

Starbucks is working with Spotify on a music deal, one where Starbucks customers will be able to easily download songs from the Starbucks playlist. Here’s the hook: It’s a backdoor route to more mobile payments.

Before you dismiss this as too bizarre to have any payments impact, music has had some surprising influences on retail purchases. To be precise, it’s not the music itself as much as allowing the shopper to be in control of the music.

MasterCard’s Payments-Integrated Fridge Leaves Futurists Cold

When MasterCard used the Consumer Electronic Show on Tuesday (Jan. 5) to unveil its Groceries By MasterCard program, it was an all-too-common payments trend: the introduction of an interesting product with long-term potential, but with the initial version being so limited as to be almost pointless.

The idea behind the Groceries introduction is compelling. The concept is that the card brand would integrate payments deep within Samsung’s new Family Hub refrigerator, a first-class example of the Internet Of Things becoming reality. That is until you start asking questions.

The Confusing Side Of Chase Pay

When Chase rolled out Chase Pay late last year, it risked customer confusion because it was adding a new payment mechanism to the Chase mobile packages already offered. Chase customers already have a Chase Visa card and, based on Chase’s recommendation, more than a million of those cards are already loaded into Apple Pay. Now Chase Pay will be automatically added to the Chase mobile app that already has 21 million active Chase customers, which guarantees there will be a significant overlap with the users of Apple Pay. The goal of Chase Pay is to have all 21 million Chase customers use Chase Pay with their existing Chase-issued credit, debit, and prepaid cards for in-store payments, which of course means they will need to learn how to use Chase Pay.

Cardholders will retain all the same rewards and consumer protections using Chase Pay as they have with their existing cards. Currently the Chase web site identifies the primary benefit as merchant discounts. But Chase customers that already have Chase cards provisioned into Apple Pay or Android Pay will confront an impossibly confusing choice relative to acceptance. Since Chase Pay will have a limited acceptance footprint that is different than the limited footprint associated with the NFC-based competitors, it strikes Mercator that a customer will simply become even more unsure what mobile app is accepted at which merchant locations and will revert instead to the tried and true physical card.

Swing The Risk And Benefit From The Math

As an industry, we can immediately grasp the benefit and value of the Payment Facilitator model. We can examine, cipher and build the mathematical equations around the cost/benefit of expedited on-boarding, the value of aggregated funds, reduced cost of signing and supporting as well as the increased sales funnel due to expanded MCC’s.

What we are minimizing, or perhaps overlooking all together in the value chain formula, is the shift in the type of loss category experienced with traditional direct merchant portfolios as compared to a PayFac operating sub-merchant model. In traditional direct portfolios, loss categories that skew to the high end of the scale typically include bankruptcies or other financial interruptions, merchant/cardholder collusion/bust out schemes and cardholder fraud that results in Chargeback losses. The common theme of these loss categories – they are event driven and typically unpredictable.