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ePayments Week: Who will deliver swipe-and-pay first?Isis invites everyone into its NFC effort, rumors swirl around Apple retail, and mobile banking is on a tear.Here's what caught my attention in the payment space this week. Swipe-and-pay cometh
Once we gain the ability to swipe and pay with our phones, what will that change? Matthew Talbot, a senior vice president for mCommerce with Sybase365, notes in a blog post this week that the technology to swipe using a credit card has been around for a while, and he wonders how much more convenient swiping with a phone will be:
And that's the key driver, in my opinion. While it was difficult to demonstrate value to a merchant of pushing the credit-card-swiping technology, the benefits of connecting with a user's mobile phone -- from identify confirmation to follow-up with text coupons -- are a clearer incentive. This week there are rumors that Apple itself might be one of the first retailers to try to make good on this opportunity. The web is buzzing about secret meetings at Apple's retail stores and plans for the unveiling of ... something. Mashable wondered if it might be a switch from employees selling on iPhones to selling on iPad 2s, while Fast Company speculated that it might be the installation of NFC-capable terminals. Mobile banking surges (almost) everywhereGlobal use of mobile banking grew rapidly over the past year, more than doubling in some key emerging markets like China and Brazil, according to research from TNS. Even in more established markets like the US, UK, Singapore, South Korea, and Sweden, uptake was high, spurred by financial institutions offering mobile banking and improvements by those who were already doing so, the report says. TNS highlighted the prediction that mobile banking will leapfrog current technologies in some emerging markets, just as communications have where many people's first phones were mobiles:
Banks are doing what they can to innovate in order to encourage them: just a few weeks ago ING Direct became the first to let customers use Bump to transfer money from one customer to another, from one smartphone to another. Both customers have to have an ING Electric Orange account, iPhones, and the but it's a start. Not everyone's happy about the pace. The chief general manager of the Reserve Bank of India (India's central bank, similar to the US Federal Reserve) suggests that India is a laggard. In remarks this week, G Padmanabhan expressed disappointment at the slow growth of mobile banking in India, even after the RBI had deregulated to allow more mobile banking services. "Implementation of some of the policy directives, which were emanated largely on the demands of stakeholders, has been far from satisfactory," he said. The remarks are no doubt designed to spur an industry where execution lags ambition, but it's likely that once mobile banking gains a foothold with at least one major institution, it will build momentum rapidly — as happened with the ATMs. Got news?News tips and suggestions are always welcome, so please send them along. If you're interested in learning more about the payment development space, check out PayPal X DevZone, a collaboration between O'Reilly and PayPal. Related:
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The coming ease of swiping and paying with your smartphone seems like an inevitability at this point, but there was some interesting speculation this week about who would bring it to us first and what the value would be. Forbes columnist Elizabeth Woyke reported that 
Uptake in more developed markets is significant, but there's still plenty of runway out in front, with only about 1 in 5 bank customers in the UK, US, and Sweden using their mobiles to bank.
Comments: 1
Kevin Faler [12 July 2011 06:09 PM]
As a domain investor, I will be introducing SwipeYourPhone.com for sale as a premium domain name in early August in the San Fransisco area. In a comparable analysis and or cause & effect...Noah was to build a boat as the rain would surely come and destroy the world. The believers, in which there were some boarded the Ark. Unfortunately, the others were left behind...