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 cards work well, leaving a steep hill to climb to get consumers to use their phones to make payments.
“Mobile has to deliver something better,” said 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 with how mobile banking can offer sophisticated payment services.
Isis, an alliance of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, showed a marketing video depicting a consumer paying for a transit ticket, shops\ping for groceries, viewing special offers and paying at a self-serve kiosk -- all with her mobile phone. The film also showed a frustrated second shopper unsuccessfully rummaging through her purse to find her plastic card. “[We want] to make the world ‘clickable,’” said Jim Stapleton, Isis chief sales officer.
Much remains 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 accounts, get access to information and perform transactions via a mobile wallet, while issuers get the ability to integrate user data with payments transactions for a variety of 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,” said Stapleton.
Eric Crozier, senior director of product development for Barclaycard U.S., said 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 information 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 devices. One of the benefits is the removal of paper. Institutions also may broaden their customer base by offering mobile payments and account information as a prepaid service.
Kevin Morrison, senior vice president of prepaid for US Bank, said 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.
