NEW ORLEANS–One of the prevailing themes of this year’s Mobile Banking Summit is there is nothing inherently wrong with plastic cards: A number of speakers, panelists and attendees with a major stake in mobile payments all acknowledge that physical cards work well, posing a steep hill to climb to get consumers to use their phones to make payments.
“Mobile has to deliver something better,” says Brent Samuels, a senior manager at First Annapolis, a payments consulting firm.
One of the players charged with delivering something better, the Isis consortium, made its case to a room full of bankers at a conference session detailing how mobile banking solutions can migrate to offering more sophisticated payment services through the channel.
Isis, which is an alliance between AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, showed a marketing video in which a person pays for a transit ticket, shops for groceries, views special offers and pays at a self serve kiosk-all by using her mobile phone. There’s even a frustrated second shopper unsuccessfully rummaging through her purse to find her plastic card thrown in for good measure. “[We want] to make the world ‘clickable,’” says Jim Stapleton, chief sales officer of Isis.
There’s still a lot to be worked out before mobile payments become ubiquitous-namely tech interoperability and revenue sharing issues, but for Isis the actual use case is clear. Consumers can activate their account, access info and perform transactions via a mobile wallet, while issuers get the ability to integrate user data with payments transactions for a variety of CRM, sales, authentication and other security and service benefits. “[The issuer] should be part of the shopping experience through more [of the process] than just the end point of the transaction,” says Stapleton.
Eric Crozier, senior director of product development for Barclaycard U.S., says the growth of mobile payments and other services is “turning around” the traditional model in which information is exchanged between bank and consumer: Consumers who are accustomed to getting info manually at a branch or in the mail, then opting in to a mobile app, will soon receive information and execute most payments and other financial business on their mobile device. One of the benefits of that trend is the removal of paper. There’s also the opportunity to broaden the overall customer base by offering mobile payments and account information as a prepaid service.
Kevin Morrison, senior vice president of prepaid for US Bank, says that offering mobile access to an account with a record of deposits and transactions that are “happening” would provide most consumers with many of the fundamental banking services that they would need.
