Tag: Mobile payment

Big Retailers’ Apple Pay Rival CurrentC Is Now On Its Deathbed

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The Merchant Consortium Exchange (MCX) announced on Wednesday that it will be ending its CurrentC beta test on June 28th and postponing all future releases. After the beta test ends, MCX will disable all customer accounts and end consumer access to the service. The news came after MCX laid off some 30 employees last month.

CurrentC was conceived by MCX, a consortium made up of big-name retailers such as Walmart, 7-Eleven, and Target, as a merchant owned mobile wallet in 2012, aiming to give the retailers more control over the check-out process and purchase data. The MCX started beta testing the system last August, almost one year after Apple Pay’s launch, and kept postponing its official launch date. As Apple Pay continues to add more banks and credit card companies to its service, CurrentC lagged behind, failing to gain any real traction among consumers.

What Retailers Need To Do
If you have been holding out on adopting other popular mobile payment systems in your stores, CurrentC’s imminent demise should come as a wake-up call. Even Walmart started developing its own mobile payment system in December, despite being a founding member of MCX and one of the most high-profile retailers blocking Apple Pay in favor of CurrentC.

With more and more consumers now shopping with their smartphones in their hands or pockets, it is only a matter of time before mobile payments become a mainstream practice for in-store purchases as the technology matures. Therefore, for brands that wish to stay ahead of the digital curve, now would be the time to start developing a digital payment strategy and incorporating existing reward and loyalty programs into point of sale systems.

For more information on how retailers can modernize the shopping experience with mobile technologies, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: 9to5Mac

Mobile Payment Expands For Android And Samsung Users

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google and Samsung continue the push for mobile payments as both companies announced new expansions for their respective payment systems. After revealing that Android Pay will be integrated into Android Instant Apps yesterday, Google announced it now allows Bank of America customers to use the bank’s ATMs with their phones via Android Pay. The search giant is also working on integrating Android Pay into its Chrome web browser to make it easier to pay online. Samsung Pay, on the other hand, now supports membership and loyalty cards in the U.S., allowing users to receive promotions and other value offers right on their Galaxy smartphones.

What Brands Need To Do
As mobile payments continue to mature and expand, retailers should take the initiative to incorporate them into their retail experience to offer shoppers frictionless check-out. They should also incorporate existing reward and loyalty programs into point of sale systems to make sure that customers can apply the value offers they received. Banking services, on the other hand, should consider further integrating their services into various mobile payment systems to better serve their customers.

 

Source: TechCrunch & CNet

Taco Bell And Lydia Jump On Slack With Chat Bots

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
More bots are coming to Slack to bring brands closer to the 2.7 million daily users of Slack, a fast-growing, team communication platform. On Wednesday, France-based peer-to-peer payment app Lydia debuted its chat bot on Slack that can understand users’ payment requests in natural language and help facilitate digital transfers between Slack users. Similarly, fast food chain Taco Bell also created a Slack bot to place, customize, and track users’ taco orders in a conversational manner.

What Brands Need To Do
While bots have long lived in the quieter corners of the Internet, the recent surge in messaging app usage and platform development is pushing them into the spotlight. Slack first launched an API for building bots on its chat platform in December 2014, and since then has been populated with bots made by third-party developers. Now, with Microsoft and Facebook both pushing businesses to reach their customers on messaging apps, we expect more brands to experiment with branded bots to connect with consumers.

To learn more about how brands can use chat bots to better serve customers via messaging interfaces, check out our Fast Forward feature on this topic.

 

Source: Wired & TechCrunch

Apple Pay Coming To Mobile Websites Later This Year

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple is planning to extend Apple Pay from apps and to the mobile web. By this holiday season, iOS users should be able to check out on mobile sites opened in Safari browser with Apple Pay. Users have been able to complete their purchases with Apple Pay in apps that support it, as well as at NFC-enabled POS terminals. And later this year, all iOS users with touch ID-enabled devices will be able to complete their purchases on mobile websites as well.  

What Brands Need To Do
This impending expansion of Apple Pay should be of great benefit for brands that sell directly on their websites, for it should help remove some friction in online shopping and reduce shopping cart abandonments, 46% of which occur at the payment stage. Therefore, brands should be pro-active when it comes to adding support for Apple Pay once such integration becomes available later this year.

For more information on how brands can modernize their user experiences to better engage with mobile shoppers, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: 9to5Mac

You Can Soon Authenticate A MasterCard Payment With A Selfie

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
MasterCard is bringing new security measures to digital payment, as part of its push towards cardless payment. The credit card company has confirmed its plan to roll out a new “Selfie Pay” feature to its mobile app this year, which will allow users to authenticate their payments by taking a selfie. The company says this facial recognition system will only be used in certain contexts when extra authentication is needed. Moreover, MasterCard revealed that it is also working on heartbeat-based authentication, which uses sensors to read a person’s electrocardiogram, the unique electrical signal produced by their heart, to identify users and confirm payments passively and more quickly than with a selfie.

What Brands Need To Do
MasterCard’s foray into biometric-based authentication is illustrative of the way mobile and wearable technologies are transforming the ways people pay. As the security measures for mobile payments continue to evolve and improve, brands need to start incorporating existing reward and loyalty programs into mobile payment solutions in order to offer customers a frictionless shopping experience.

 

Sources: The Verge

Apple Pay Users Can Get Free Tube Rides In London For Three Days

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Londoners will be able to ride the Tube for free with Apple Pay over the next three Mondays, thanks to a “Fare Free Mondays” promotion that MasterCard is running to incentivize its users to ditch their credit cards for mobile payment. On February 29th, March 8th, and March 15th, London Tube riders just need to add their MasterCard cards to Apple Pay, and tap their iPhones at the turnstile to take free rides, thanks to the London Underground’s contactless ticketing system installed in 2003.

What Brands Need To Do
This MasterCard promotion provides a good example for the kind of cool sponsorships that brands can leverage to incentivize the use of a product or service while aligning the brand with great experiences and providing customers with value. Furthermore, encouraging users to use mobile payments can help brands remove some friction in online purchases, while also allowing brands to take advantage of reward programs linked to mobile payment solutions. Therefore brands that wish to stay ahead of the digital curve should consider forging partnerships and running similar promotions to onboard more customers to mobile payments.

For more information on how brands can modernize their user experiences to better engage with shoppers, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: The Verge

Global Watch: Apple Pay Launches In China, 38 Million Cards Registered in One Day

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple first announced in December that it was partnering with China’s UnionPay to bring Apple Pay to users in China sometime in 2016. Now a year and a half after launching in the US., the Cupertino company officially launched Apple Pay in China on Thursday, and, according to Mashable’s report, it has been an early success as 38 million credit cards were linked on launch day. In fact, many Chinese users complained that they were unable to sign up due to what Apple later confirmed to be a “planned gradual rollout throughout the day.”

Market Impact
Unlike U.S., mobile payment is already widely adopted by mainstream consumers, thanks to the popularity of Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Wallet, which experts suggested would pose challenges for Apple Pay. However, with the backing of UnionPay, the only domestic bank card organization in mainland China, Apple Pay may just stand a good chance at conquering this important global market, as it plays an integral part in Chinese banks’ plan to digitize its offline payment services and compete against the likes of Alipay.

What Brands Need To Do
As Apple continues to push Apple Pay into more global markets, expanding its scope and capturing more users in the process, it is time for brands that have businesses in China start using Apple Pay’s integration of reward programs to connect with the local consumers. As a market that is quite accustomed to offline mobile payment, this also presents new opportunities for retailers with stores in China to incorporate existing reward and loyalty programs into new point of sale systems for a frictionless shopping experience.

 

Sources: 9to5 Mac

Header image courtesy of apple.com/cn

PayPal Launches New Platform To Proliferate Mobile Buy Buttons

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
PayPal is building a platform for small businesses to integrate buy buttons across platforms and sales channels. Named PayPal Commerce, the new service launches today in closed beta, setting the stage for how PayPal could potentially reboot its platform for mobile payment using technology from Modest, a company PayPal acquired shortly after splitting from eBay. Third-party services will be integrated in the back end to the Commerce platform via a set of APIs, which allows merchants to easily place customizable buy buttons across their mobile sales channels to process digital and mobile payments via PayPal.

What Brands Need To Do
The growing prevalence of buy buttons goes hand in hand with the development of social ecommerce and increasing adoption of mobile payments. Brands selling on digital and social channels need to consider using services like PayPal Commerce in order to translate the convenience of “buy buttons” and the network effect on social platforms into actual sales.

For more information on how brands can better utilize buy buttons to reach prospective customers with an omnichannel approach. check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: ZDNet

Global Watch: Apple Pay Continues Its International Expansion

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple Pay continues its global expansion as it enters two new major international markets this week. Apple’s mobile payment solution officially launched in Canada on Tuesday, and will become available in Australia starting this Thursday. In both countries, however, Apple Pay will be limited to supporting American Express cards for now, as part of Apple’s global partnership with AmEx. Moreover, Apple Pay has also added support for two major British banks Tesco and TSB 4 months after its initial launch in July, further expanding its scope in the U.K. market.

What Brands Need To Do
Since its initial launch over a year ago, Apple Pay has come a long way, gaining growing support from banks and merchants. Last month, Starbucks, KFC, and Chili’s became the most recent companies that added support for Apple Pay in their U.S. stores. As Apple pushes Apple Pay into more global markets, it is set to capture more global users in the process. For brands that have a presence in those aforementioned markets, this presents a good opportunity to target local consumers using Apple Pay’s integration of reward programs.  

 

Source: Apple Insider

MasterCard To Turn Everyday Gadgets Into Credit Cards

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Soon you may be paying for a dinner with your car key. Earlier this week, MasterCard announced it is launching a new program that aims to add contactless payment capabilities to everyday gadgets. MasterCard has already gotten some tech partners on board to create some prototypes, which include a key fob made by GM, a ring from Ringly, and a wristband from Nymi, all with MasterCard’s wireless payments tech built in.

What Brands Need To Do
As more and more devices become connected, MasterCard is smart to start experimenting with connected devices and develop payment solutions that are independent of smartphones. As mobile payment continues to evolve, brands need to keep up with changing consumer purchasing behavior and start integrating value offers and loyalty programs into a growing array of emerging payment solutions.

 

Source: The Verge