Vendors to the financial services industry persuasively presented the case for the use of wireless communications for on-line point of sale transactions at an industry conference last week.
The problem, however, was that the vendors were mostly preaching to each other. The conference, held in New York and sponsored by Wireless magazine, attracted fewer than 100, and very few of them were from merchant-acquiring banks.
Perhaps the bankers who did not attend anticipated this nugget from the keynote speech by Charles T. Russell, the former president and chief executive of Visa International: "One recognizes that there are many financial applications for wireless technology. I shall not bore you with reiterations of the obvious."
Bankers who did attend the two-day meeting, titled "Unleashing the Power of Wireless: Solutions for On-line Financial Transactions," were rewarded with some very hands-on, practical advice about the use of the technology.
Mr. Russell set the tone at the end of his address by emphasizing that wireless point of sale systems must be reliable, secure, speedy, and flexible if banks are ever to persuade merchants to use them.
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John Menzel, a marketing director for the terminal manufacturer Verifone Inc., echoed Mr. Russell in his session on lowering the barriers to resistance for wireless POS transactions.
Mr. Menzel spoke of the need for standards, citing 12 major processors in the United States, each with its own certified applications and all with different applications for different markets like retail outlets, restaurants, or hotels.
Other speakers mostly emphasized the potential that wireless technology has for bringing plastic payment options to merchants who today cannot accept credit or debit cards.
For example, retailers who operate out of kiosks at Union Station in Washington cannot run traditional phone lines for two reasons: their mobility and the fact that the station's landmark status does not allow for many alterations.
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Elizabeth Hubbard, a project manager for Dallas-based FirstNet Corp., said remote merchants want to improve the customer perception of their businesses, and part of that involves the ability to accept plastic payment options.
Ms. Hubbard's company, a small credit card processor, initiated a point of sale test based on cellular digital packet data technology, which met merchants' marketing needs and allowed for flexibility in where they could place the POS equipment.
One FirstNet client, a Phoenix-based company that installs air conditioners, previously relied on sending paper invoices and then waiting to be paid. With a mobile wireless POS terminal, company representatives can accept card payments on the spot as soon as the installation is complete.
"Our company is growing at a 35% to 40% rate, and the reason is we are addressing forums that heretofore have not yet really gotten into POS plastic acceptance," said Ms. Hubbard.
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Visa International will be exploring wireless possibilities - especially for member institutions in regions outside the United States. The reason, explained senior vice president Dennis N. Moser, is that telephone technology in other parts of the world is not as advanced or as reliable as the copper-wire-based U.S. network.
"In the United States our members are looking at wireless alternatives only where they make sense from a cost or a performance point of view," he said.
Many of the conference speakers emphasized that on a per-transaction basis, wireless often costs much less than dial-up communications, a potentially huge selling point for merchant-acquiring banks.
