Posts Tagged ‘mobile’
How To Get Cracking On Your PayFac-ing
There are at least two great reasons to jump into the payment facilitator game– increased revenues and market share—and many many tools to help. One of those tools is advice from the hard-won success achieved by those who have made the leap.
In a session on the ins and outs of starting a payfac at the second annual Payment Facilitator Day at Transact16 in April, Kevin Harris of RunSignUp said training people was more of a challenge than software concerns, and David Weiss of Yapstone shared the difficulties of international expansion. Nick Starai of gateway tech company NMI told the audience to concentrate on the business they know best rather than focus on technological bells and whistles. The highlights of the discussion fill this week’s paymentfacilitator.com podcast, the next best thing to having been there.
Read MoreWhy Are Merchants So Afraid Of Mobile Payments?
With all of the hoopla surrounding mobile payments, there is often little attention paid to the pragmatic obstacles faced by retailers in the field. And those obstacles are causing a river of fear, loathing and more fear among merchants when they consider mobile payments. Today, the ease in which a customer can order a pizza is becoming almost as important as the recipe for the sauce. But when it comes to mobile, it’s all about ordering, loyalty, and offers—pretty much everything but payment. Why is payment not top of mind? From the chain’s perspective, it’s an ugly topics about increased costs and added complexities. For many of my restaurant clients, mobile payments cause more problems than it solves.
Let’s not beat around the bush: there is loathing among the restaurant industry when it comes to payment card processing and the associated costs. They still are angry about EMV. I am constantly being asked what can be done with technology to reduce or mitigate these costs. “Can the delivery driver swipe a card at the customer’s door? Will that help? If the customer orders online, but picks up their pizza in the restaurant, can we just authorize the transaction online and then cancel it and re-do it in the restaurant to get a card present rate? Can we look at alternative forms of payment that will reduce our overall payment processing costs?” And while these are all good ideas, each one comes with technical and operational challenges that are non-trivial and, in some cases, can make the situation worse than before.
Read MoreMasterCard Thinks It Can Standardize Mobile Loyalty. And It Might Be Right
For mobile payments to move into the massive adoption phase, some version of loyalty/couponing will be essential. Otherwise, once the novelty wears off, there are simply no sustainable reasons for shoppers to stick with mobile. But with every mobile player preparing to somehow push loyalty, the chance of having conflicting incompatible technology is all-but-certain. Can MasterCard change that?
On Tuesday (Nov. 17), the number two card brand introduced a loyalty middleware specification that it hopes will be adopted widely enough to give mobile loyalty a chance to grow seamlessly. Given that few if any mobile payment schemes will be offered without support for at least one issuer’s MasterCard, the card brand seems a sufficiently politically neutral player to sidestep the usual vendor resistance. In MasterCard’s statement, the brand said it’s proposed specification “enables mobile applications to offer a seamless connection between payment, promotions and loyalty redemption. It enables consumers to select their loyalty card, the coupons/promotions they want to redeem, and make a payment in a single or double tap at a contactless terminal.”
Read MoreTransit Mobile Payment Is A PF Dream Come True
On Monday (Nov. 16), San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee officially brought his city’s public transit system into the mobile payment era, following similar moves by cities across the globe. Just last month, the totality of London’s black cabs said that they will accept mobile payment.
These efforts are crucial for the payment facilitator community as nowhere is the need for the speed and convenience of mobile payments more needed than in urban public transit. Of potentially greater significance are the huge volumes of consumers that are using such systems—and the extreme tendency of such communities to get comfort from what other travelers are doing. In short, successful transportation trials have a far greater chance of meaningfully moving the acceptance needle than almost any other vertical. As much as coffee shops may gravitate to every kind of mobile payment imaginable, they simply don’t have the volume—nor the copycat psychology—that comes with the transportation territory.
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