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What We’re Reading: Digital Wallet, Social Media and Data

April 11, 2013 By Banking.com Staff Leave a Comment

Below are interesting stories the Banking.com staff has been reading over the past week. What have you been reading? Let us know in the comments section below or Tweet @bankingdotcom.

  • Digital Wallet Race Is Far From Over

American Banker

Payments players with digital wallet aspirations — including Visa, MasterCard, Google, PayPal, Apple and Isis — are all vying for customers’ virtual pocket books in a race to truly electronic transactions. Yet none have had much luck, so far. There have been delays in launches (e.g. Isis’s delays on launching in its two pilot cities); changes in the way at least one major, digital wallet innovator processes its transactions (think: Google Wallet); and, most importantly, a lack of features appealing enough to spur widespread adoption. “Mobile wallets have been around for a while, and even for us, in the industry, we are only just starting to adopt these technologies,” says Philip Philliou, a payments consultant. “I don’t think anyone is far ahead in terms of disruption. We are still early on.”

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  • 3 Things Banks Must Do to Survive the Mobile Payments Jungle

American Banker

The mobile wallet market appears to be wide open to new entrants, with banks having a slight edge. While more than 20 percent of U.S. online consumers prefer to use their checking account for digital wallet services, 17 percent prefer PayPal, according to Gartner. That gap could quickly close in the next few years. To survive in the mobile payments landscape, banks need to do three things: Integrate mobile into existing offerings. Rebuild loyalty. Banks need to leverage emerging customer analytics techniques, coupled with geo-location services through mobile devices in order to make relevant offers at the right time. Redefine success. It’s no longer sufficient for banks to measure success by counting the number of mobile payments and online users.

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  • All Those New Channels Affecting Accuracy of Data

Credit Union Journal

Credit unions face many challenges as channels diversify and members demand digital options. According to a recent Experian QAS survey, financial institutions are operating through an average of four different channels, the most popular being the organization’s website. While these new channels are exciting endeavors, many credit unions are experiencing problems with collecting accurate contact data. According to that same data, 91% of financial institutions suspect their customer/member and prospect data might be inaccurate in some way. On average, respondents think that as much as 18% of their data might be inaccurate. Even worse, another 27% of respondents are unsure how much of their data is inaccurate.

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  • Introducing The Social Media Power 100 Rankings For Banks And Credit Unions

The Financial Brand

The Power 100 is an interactive list of retail banks and credit unions who have achieved the most social media traction. Components of the Power 100 score include Facebook ‘Likes,’ Facebook engagement rate, Twitter followers, tweets sent, YouTube views and YouTube subscribers. The top 15 institutions in the banking and credit union category are as follows: Chase, Capital One, ICICI Bank, E*TRADE Bank, Bank of American, Axis Bank, GT Bank, Wells Fargo, Citi, Commonwealth, FNB, Navy FCU, Bank of Nova Scotia, NAB and TD Canada.

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  • DDoS: The Worst Case Scenario

Javelin Strategy & Research Blog

Since September of last year, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam has engaged in cyberwarfare against U.S. financial institutions, and it is a war with which they have had a great deal of apparent success if we believe that their goal was to inconvenience U.S. bank customers by rendering online banking portals inaccessible for a number of hours at a time. More than information sharing on best practices is needed – financial institutions should pool resources to ensure the availability of excess network capacity, and network operators must be involved in the effort to identify infected servers and to subsequently stop the malicious traffic its source.  And while intelligence support is a good start, the Federal government must identify those responsible and cripple their ability to continue this campaign.

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  • Facebook tries to get more in your face

Los Angeles Times

It’s hard not to detect a whiff of desperation in Facebook’s new please-don’t-go interface, which is determined to keep people within the social network as long as it can. Facebook Home is intended to dominate Android smartphones, making Facebook your first and last port of call as you traverse the wireless wonderland. It will keep Facebook features front and center, rather than require users to use an app.

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  • Credit Union Takes an Early Lead with E-Signatures

SYS CON Media Blog

Aaron Pugh recently published a story on credit unions using e-signatures on CreditUnions.com. He writes that only eight and a half percent of credit unions larger than $20 million in assets currently offer e-signatures to their customers even though the market for e-signatures as a whole has shot up 48 percent from 2011 to 2012 according to Gartner Research. Among the early adopters in the industry is the Teachers Credit Union in Ontario, Canada. The member-owned financial organization serves employees of education and their families throughout the province. The 15,000 members conduct business through multiple branch locations, ATMs, online and via mobile banking.

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Filed Under Industry News Tagged With data, mobile payments, mobile wallet, rankings, social media, what we're reading

What We’re Reading: Privacy Rules, Mobile Wallets and Banking Acquisitions

February 7, 2013 By Banking.com Staff 1 Comment

Below are interesting stories the Banking.com staff has been reading over the past week. What have you been reading? Let us know in the comments section below or Tweet @bankingdotcom.

  • Four Ways the FTC’s New Privacy Rules Affect Mobile Banking Apps

American Banker

The Federal Trade Commission has been toughening its stance on consumer privacy protection, and this directly affects the mobile applications banks offer their customers. On Saturday the agency issued a report, Mobile Privacy Disclosures: Building Trust Through Transparency, that offers advice on keeping using consumers’ data private. It offers recommendations to four sets of stakeholders: operating system providers (like Apple and Google), app providers, advertising networks, and app developer trade associations. Banks that provide mobile banking, PFM, trading or wallet apps fit in the app provider category.

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  • Bank Tech Vendor Shakeup Continues: FIS to Acquire mFoundry

Bank Systems & Technology

The consolidation trend in the bank technology solution provider space continues to accelerate, with news today that Jacksonville, Fla.-based FIS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the remaining 78% interest in mobile banking and payment solutions provider mFoundry. Previous to this transaction, FIS held a 22% interest in mFoundry (Larkspur, Calif.), which was founded in 2004 and now serves more than 850 clients in financial services and retailing. According to a statement from FIS, the addition of mFoundry “enables FIS to leverage its technology assets across a broader client base.

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  • The Latest Trends That Will Redefine Online Banking

Business 2 Community

Online banking has had a tremendous effect on banks because people can now complete financial transactions by visiting secure websites that are maintained by brick-and-mortar or virtual banks, credit unions or brokerage houses. While this is convenient consumers are also concerned that their financial information may be accessed by hackers via the Internet, and banks are intent on providing security for their customers and keeping up with the latest technological trends at the same time.

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  • ‘Me Too’ Rules in Mobile Banking

Credit Union Times

Anthony Genovese, a vice president at payments company Compass Plus stated that central advice from Compass Plus to credit unions is to “focus on the importance of the mobile channel” and to take steps to make use of uniquely mobile features such as built-in GPS (the phone knows where it is), a camera, and in an increasing number of phones NFC, the near-field communications payments chip. Genovese added that “the stickiness of mobile user is questionable. Financial institutions aren’t offering many features that compel users to keep using the channel.”

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  • Apple Patent Reveals Peer-To-Peer Mobile Banking Idea, Using iTunes As Bank

Fast Company

Fast Company checks in with last year’s Most Innovative Companies to see how their big ideas fared in 2012–and how they’ll play out in 2013 and beyond. Apple has just revealed one of its more out-there ideas in a patent application titled Ad-Hoc Cash Dispensing Network. The proposed patent, in short, is a peer-to-peer lending concept that would use iTunes accounts as a connection to let people loan or borrow small amounts of money to each other. The patent, which was reported on by the Unwired View website, shows just how far outside the box the thinking goes over at Cupertino.

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  • Will You Be Ready When Mobile Wallets Turn Banking Upside Down?

The Financial Brand

Financial marketers had better wrap their heads around the impending mobile-dominant landscape, and fast. Mobile devices will soon be the central tool consumers use to manage banking relationships. When consumers start embracing mobile wallets and making digital transactions, banking will never be the same again. Around every 10 or 20 years, something big comes along that completely transforms the world of banking — ATMs, debit cards, the internet. Unquestionably, the next big thing to rock banking will be mobile wallets.

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  • The Forgotten Secrets Of The Enterprise Giants: Virality, Word Of Mouth, And Other Radical Experiments

TechCrunch

Today, Intuit is generally recognized as the only party to “own” the accounting channel, but they came at it via a totally radical approach that its competitors seem to have forgotten (which is probably why Intuit has had such firm footing for decades, despite legions of challengers). Don’t be afraid of failure. Be afraid of not trying. Salesforce, Concur and Intuit weren’t, and now we can’t imagine a world without them.

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  • Bank of America’s online banking crashes Angry customers vent frustrations on Twitter.

USA Today

Bank of America says its online banking website crashed Friday, leaving customers unable to access their accounts. Starting late Friday morning, customers trying to log on saw a message that the site was “temporarily unavailable.” The lender announced a few hours later that the problems had been resolved, but not before it endured a fire storm of complaints and criticism. Angry Bank of America customers took to Twitter to say that they were left frustrated, trying to do their banking on the first day of the month.

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  • Identity: The New Security Perimeter

Wired

Traditional security perimeters encircling corporate networks no longer meet the needs of today’s enterprise. As businesses move to cloud computing, employees are able to gain access to their work apps and corporate networks through almost any internet-connected device. The breadth of access, and choice of devices, breaks down traditional security boundaries and forces IT to seek a new security model that can deal with this anywhere reality. Security, therefore, must evolve from an on-site protection model and adapt to securely provide access to off-premises devices.

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Filed Under Industry News Tagged With Apple, FTC, Intuit, mobile wallet, PFM, privacy

Going Luddite on Mobile

October 22, 2012 By Banking.com Staff Leave a Comment

Tracking the adoption of mobile banking is like putting human behavior under a microscope…again. In a sense, it’s very much like the adoption of online banking (or online anything else), only on a much faster scale. To some, it’s still odd working with professionals who can’t remember what business was like before the Internet. Imagine how we’ll feel when the colleague in the next cubicle has no memory of life before “there’s an app for that.”

The issue seems to have taken on extra relevance because there’s been a flurry of articles recently about how mobile banking is not being adopted as widely as it should because of security concerns. Even the Better Business Bureau (BBB) is offering tips on safe mobile banking practices.

There’s nothing wrong with good, sensible advice, but maybe we need some perspective here.

First, let’s be clear about the adoption of mobile banking: It’s growing at an astonishing rate. As far back as 2011, an eternity in tech years, research firm Yankee Group projected in its Mobile Money Forecast that global mobile transactions would grow from $241 billion last year to $1 trillion-plus by 2015. That’s a staggering CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 56%–how many other trends can we say that about?

More to the point, the practice continues to grow without huge amounts of education or even promotion. Just a few years ago, the term ‘mobile app’ didn’t even exist; now there are literally millions of them, and most of us are blasé about what we choose to download and use on a regular basis. The mobile device has effectively blurred the distinction between personal and business use and forced our employers to keep up rather than push us to try new software.

Sure, putting money into the mix changes things. It’s one thing to download a video game for playing while on the road and entirely another to use a new button to make an impulse investment or just transfer funds. But what’s remarkable is not how few people do exactly this and more, it’s how many do it every day.

Again, good advice is always welcome, but it’s likely that most of have already heard (perhaps many times over) what the BBB is telling us we should do to protect out investments. Don’t follow links; don’t download authorized applications; keep devices secure. That said, we probably need to keep hearing it.

It used to be said that while Windows PCs got hacked relentlessly, Macintoshes were pretty safe. That’s statistically accurate, and therefore true, but one reason is that the customer base for Apple products was comparatively small. Hackers went after Windows users for the same reason that Willie Sutton allegedly gave for robbing banks: that’s where the money is. Well, guess where the money is now.

There will always be some, from the hyper-cautious to the Luddites, who resist mobile banking. The alternate reality is that there’s already a vast customer base for mobile banking, and they deserve the greatest attention (which is exactly what cyber-criminals are giving them).

The mobile experience for every human action will continue to evolve and gain in popularity, and banking is no exception. There will be viruses and data breaches, and a few will gain enough of a profile to scare off some potential users. But the technology itself offers too much flexibility, productivity and convenience to completely outweigh the risks.

There’s a downside, and we need to keep it in mind. But as industry professionals, it’s our job not to be overwhelmed by the threats but instead focus on keeping the practice as secure as possible. Our customers—and there are many of them—need that.

This article originally appeared as a guest post on MyBankTracker.com.

Filed Under Industry News Tagged With banking news, banking services, mobile apps, mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile wallet, online banking, PFM tools, security

New Technologies Are Coming for Unbanked, Underbanked

September 21, 2012 By Simon Zhen Leave a Comment

*This post originally appeared on MyBankTracker

In the past year, countless prepaid cards have flooded the nation to target the large portion of the American population that is either unbanked or underbanked. Acknowledging that the market for these alternative financial products is rapidly growing, more tech companies are catering to this group of consumers.

According to a recent survey by the FDIC, in 2011, 8.2 percent of U.S. households do not have bank accounts, up from 7.6 percent in 2009. And 20.1 percent of U.S. households have bank accounts, but rely on alternative channels for financial services (e.g., check-cashing, payday loans and money orders), up from 18.2 percent in 2009.

Even traditional banks have jumped on the bandwagon to compete against non-bank prepaid-card companies and get a piece of the prepaid-card market.

Last fall, Regions Bank started rolling out asuite of products and services that included a prepaid card and check-cashing and Western Union services. In July, Chase, the largest bank in the country, launched the Liquid prepaid card that does almost everything that a regular Chase checking account can do.

“As banks have steadily inflated the cost of banking, more and more depositors are seeking substitutes for bank accounts with escalating costs, high minimum balances and surprise fees,” said Jim Wells, president of Wellspring Consulting, a firm that specializes in solutions for the unbanked and underbanked.

But, with the proliferation of financial technology, the focus is shifting to serving the unbanked and underbanked through mobile devices.

Last week, at a Finovate conference, two companies demonstrated their versions of a mobile wallet for the unbanked or underbanked consumer.

The CAT (Cash and Transact) mobile wallet, by Emida, is an app that is based solely on the consumer’s smartphone. Through participating retailers, users can refill their CAT accounts with cash (for a convenience fee of $1.50). Then, they can use the funds to pay for purchases through the app.

The Flip mobile wallet, from PreCash, is an app that allows users to perform instant mobile check deposit and make expedited bill payments — two services that were never before available on a prepaid card account.

“Although these mobile-enabled, prepaid card-based accounts are attractive to far more than just low-income consumers, one key to success will be in making the services available via even the simplest of mobile devices,” said Wells.

In countries where financial institutions are hard to come by, mobile devices are the preferred channel for financial transactions. For example, more than 17 million mobile subscribers in Kenya use a mobile-phone-based money transfer service called M-Pesa, which enables users to deposit and withdraw money, pay bills, buy phone minutes and send money to bank accounts or other users.

In the U.S., the decreasing cost of smartphones may make it seem like everyone has a smartphone — but non-smartphones are still the most common mobile devices among the low-income population.

According to the Federal Reserve, 64 percent of the unbanked have access to a mobile phone (18 percent have a smartphone) while 91 percent of the underbanked have access to a mobile phone (57 percent have a smartphone).

Regardless of the types of mobile devices, the demand for alternative financial products and services is there.

And, history tells us that unbanked and underbanked consumers could be the users of the next wave of financial innovation.

In last year’s fall Finovate conference, card-linked offers made regular appearances on stage. Since then, card-linked offers became more available to bank customers. Bank of America, Capital One, American Express and many other financial institutions began providing card-linked deals.

Considering that the conference offers a good idea of what products and services we’ll see in the near future, it wouldn’t be a surprise to find that, by this time next year, there are more prepaid card accounts and other financial services that live on mobile devices.

 What are you offering your customers? Let us know in the comments below!

Filed Under Industry News Tagged With banking news, financial literacy, financial services, mobile payments, mobile wallet, PFM tools, technology, unbanked, underbanked

What We’re Reading: NACHA Round-up, Social Media and Mobile Wallets

May 17, 2012 By Banking.com Staff Leave a Comment

Below are interesting stories the Banking.com staff has been reading over the past week. What have you been reading? Let us know in the comments section below or Tweet @bankingdotcom.

  • Big Check Volumes Aren’t Just for Big Banks, a Small Bank Says

American Banker

Business clients that receive thousands of checks per month typically can’t get automated bulk check processing services from a small bank. And if the services matter to those clients, the small banks lose their business to larger rivals. But Farmers & Merchants Bank, a $4.7 billion-asset bank based in Long Beach, Calif., is launching an image cash letter service. In doing so, the bank is demonstrating an emerging option for smaller banks to deepen relationships with business clients, speed processing and take greater control over the quality of check images that are prepared for deposit.

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  • Nacha Payments 2012 Round-up

Celent Banking Blog

Last week he was in Baltimore for the Nacha Payments annual event, a regular fixture on his calendar. He just wanted to share some impressions, some of his own, others themes from the many conversations he had. Mobile loomed large on the agenda. It’s not an area that he specifically focuses on but he was struck by the diverging opinions. On one hand, some banks were saying that those customers who used the mobile service were the most profitable. However, others also said they didn’t know how or when they’d make money from mobile.

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  • Why Smaller Banks Should offer Image Cash Letter Deposit Services

Celent Banking Blog

Farmers & Merchants Bank, a $2 billion-asset bank based in Long Beach, Calif., is launching an image cash letter service. The accompanying press release caught the eye of American Banker resulting in a story today on the topic, Big Check Volumes Aren’t Just for Big Banks, a Small Bank Says, written by John Adams. In a previous post, he commented on why wholesale lockbox belongs in the headlines even though it has been around as a staple treasury management offering for five decades. The post emphasized that after all these years, the market opportunity for wholesale lockbox services remains significant.

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  • Social Media Needs ‘Socialnomics’

Credit Union Journal

Credit unions would be well-advised to take a course in “Socialnomics,” according to one person. Socialnomics is the intersection of social media and word of mouth, creating “world of mouth” advertising, according to Erik Qualman, an expert on social media and author of a book with that name. “Socialnomics is word of mouth on digital steroids,” he said, noting many consumers are moving past what had been considered a big deal just a few years ago-doing research online at home before going out to shop. “People are now using their smart phones to scan QR codes in stores, which not only lets them comparison shop, it lets them get recommendations on the product from their Facebook friends.”

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  • Mobile Wallets Have Uphill Climb to Consumer Acceptance

eMarketer

Will mobile wallets take off in the US? If marketers, carriers and other service providers expect technology that allows mobile phones to act as credit or debit cards to gain wide acceptance, they have a lot of work to do to convince consumers to adopt. According to March 2012 panel-based research by marketing solutions agency Catapult, just one-quarter of US consumers were at least somewhat interested in using a mobile wallet for in-store purchases. In contrast, 58% were uninterested—including 41% who reported a complete lack of interest. Correspondingly, in January 2012, market research firm TNS found that 60% of US mobile phone users were not interested in mobile wallet technology.

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  • Infographic: The Digital Lives of American Moms

Nielson Wire

Moms are at the center of their family’s offline life, so it’s little surprise that they’re also at the center of many of the biggest trends online as well. Whether to look up the latest product reviews or to connect with friends, families, and even brands through social networks, American moms are particularly active and influential online. American moms use social media frequently, with nearly three out of four moms visiting Facebook during March 2012. When using social media, moms are 38 percent more likely to become a fan of or follow a brand online, and moms who blog are more than twice as likely to follow brands and celebrities compared to the online average. Moms visit blogs more often, and are 27 percent more likely to visit Blogger and 26 percent more likely to visit WordPress.com than the general online population.

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  • Mobile Payments Expected To Surge (INFOGRAPHIC)

Huffington Post

Mobile payments are expected to hit 21.3 percent in 2012. Mobile payment technology is making it unnecessary to carry a wallet or maintain a bulky cash register at your checkout counter. By using devices and apps like Square and Google Wallet, small businesses are getting paid faster and customers are making more reliable purchases. Data from Deloitte show that mobile payment usage is expected to spring from 6.8 percent in 2009 to a predicted 21.3 percent in 2012.

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  • New free website e-mails you when you’re going over budget

Sun Sentinel

Plantation-based PowerWallet.com helps people manage their finances, sending reminders to pay bills — from credit cards to monthly cable charges — and alerting consumers when they’re near their budget limits. “It keeps your spending in control,” said PowerWallet co-creator and president, Bob Sullivan. “We looked at the market about a year ago and found people were having trouble with their finances.” So Sullivan helped set up the secure website that allows people to safely list their finances online, including their investments, bank accounts and bills.

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Filed Under Industry News Tagged With banking news, mobile wallet, NACHA, social media, what we're reading

2020 Hindsight: A Look at Cash, Credit and Smartphones in 2020

April 23, 2012 By Banking.com Staff Leave a Comment

Who needs cash? Who needs credit cards? They’re so old-school—and frankly so vulnerable to being misplaced or stolen –that they’re an inducement to danger. Fortunately, this is about to change…maybe.

A new report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center brings news that mobile payments could all but eliminate the need to carry money or credit cards around. In advanced nations, at least, a majority of consumers will trust their phones and mobile devices to conduct end-to-end transactions.

And when will this happen? In the year 2020. Yes, 2020.

For the record, even that date carries multiple caveats. A strong majority, 65 percent, of the technology experts surveyed for the report signed on to that timeframe. The rest of the respondents disagreed with the premise (there was no middle ground allowed), and contend that this discipline will not gain sufficient traction in the timeframe discussed.

To be sure, the Internet terrain is pockmarked by failures, radical technologies that were designed to fundamentally transform human behavioral patterns and, well, didn’t. There are also plenty of legitimate reasons to doubt the broad-scale adoption of mobile payments.

To start with, not everyone has a smartphone—according to the Federal Reserve, the number is still only 44 percent of the population—and not everyone will anytime soon. Security and privacy concerns have always loomed large, and they will continue to do so.

Besides, consumer fears are not the only impediment to success: Credit card providers, among other business entities involved in the mix, will need to redirect their resources, and that likely won’t happen overnight. Most of them have considerable investments in the existing infrastructures, and a top-to-bottom overhaul probably isn’t on the priority list yet. Even when it does happen, everything from standards and the resulting interoperability to competitive positioning could lead to market fragmentation.

Still, it’s also important to note that however futuristic the concept of mobile payments seems, in some ways it’s already here. Consumers aren’t only using their phones to talk: According to other recent Pew Internet studies, 10 percent of Americans have used their phones to donate to charity via text message, more than a third use them for online banking, and almost half, 46 percent, have used a mobile app to, well, buy another mobile app.

Other research backs this up too, and retail seems a particularly active area. Analyst firm comScore reports that not only have 38 percent of smartphone owners used their devices to make buy products, but half the U.S. smartphone user base has gone online to look up deals while they’re inside a brick-and-mortar outlet, and nearly one in five even scanned barcodes.

As for the ‘advanced nations only’ argument, here’s another nugget cited in the Pew report: Users of Kenya’s M-Pesa system now send money amounting to 20 percent of the country’s entire GDP via text message.

For all Internet prognosticators, the reality is that this might be yet another area where we don’t know what will happen, or more importantly when. There are statistics and anecdotes to back up virtually any hypothesis, just as many changes have blindsided even the most accurate analysts.

The groundwork for a radical transformation has been laid. While there are certainly standards issues to work through, particularly at the back end, many of the tools needed to change payment habits are already in place. There’s a new generation that can’t remember a world without iPhone and iPad apps for everything. And some emerging mobile technologies have allowed business and consumers alike in developing markets to leapfrog landline infrastructures.

It may be that 2020 is the year of mass mobile payments. It may, as some analysts claim, take more time than that. But let’s not be surprised if it takes less.

Filed Under Industry News Tagged With mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile wallet

The Next Frontier: Mobile Money

September 20, 2011 By Eric Dunn 2 Comments

By Eric Dunn, Senior Vice President, Payments Initiatives, Intuit

The adoption of smartphone-based mobile banking is one of the fastest trends in digital banking. While today’s smartphone applications, for the most part, mirror the functionality of bank websites with balances, transfers and bill pay, a new frontier is opening with the proliferation of mobile wallets and payment solutions. Already, hundreds of thousands of retail point-of-sale terminals support near field communications (NFC) protocols such as PayPass (MasterCard) and PayWave (Visa). Industry forecasts for smartphones suggest that at least 50 percent of new smartphones will be NFC-capable within 18 months.

As the new frontier of smartphone-based mobile payments is unfolding, there is uncertainty for financial institutions.  How will banks and credit unions participate?  Some industry players — PayPal, Google, the wireless carriers and others – are designing mobile payments ecosytems in a way that could reduce the role of banks.

As a business partner to many financial institutions, Intuit wants to share some of our newest thinking about the mobile payments landscape, and in particular how banks and credit unions can preserve or expand their role in payments during the evolution to digital and mobile. Specifically, Intuit has been working closely with terminal manufacturers and others in the mobile payments ecosystem to develop a working prototype of an NFC-based payment solution that is complementary to smartphone-based mobile banking.

What’s on your mind about mobile payments?  Is this a payment option your financial institution is interested in offering? To join the conversation visit In:Volve.

Filed Under Industry News Tagged With Google, mobile money, mobile payments, mobile wallet, NFC technology

The Mobile Wallet

May 16, 2011 By Banking.com Staff 1 Comment

Mobile technology is changing the way consumers and businesses process payments. From smartphone apps that allow you to process payments, to depositing checks via your mobile device, it’s increasingly easy to rely on a phone as your wallet.

CreditSesame.com posted an infographic posing the question, “Will Smartphones Replace Your Wallet?” The infographic outlined interesting stats about the future of mobile payments, including:

  • The value of purchases via mobile phones is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 68% between 2010 and 2015.
  • Spending via Smartphones is expected to reach $214 billion by 2015.
  • Paper money is on the decline. Over the next five years, cash use will decrease by $200 billion in the U.S.

To view the full infographic, visit CreditSesame.com.

How do you see mobile payments changing the banking industry? Let us know in the comments section below.

Filed Under For Financial Institutions Tagged With mobile, mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile wallet

Mobile Payments Round-Up

April 4, 2011 By Banking.com Staff Leave a Comment

The mobile payments industry is evolving quickly, so our staff has gathered some of the interesting mobile payments stories we’ve enjoyed reading over the past week. Let us know what you’ve been reading in the comments section below.

More than a smartphone: The New York Times recently reported on the companies contending for a piece of the mobile wallet. With no clear leader in the space everyone from banks, credit card companies, payment networks and mobile phone carriers are trying to find where they can fit into the mobile wallet, and how they will get paid. According to the New York Times, the mobile wallet provides a big opportunity, “The stakes are enormous because small, hidden fees that are generated every time consumers swipe their cards add up to tens of billions of dollars annually in the United States alone.”

Google’s jump into NFC: This week, Google announced that they are teaming with MasterCard and CitiGroup to embed technology into Android devices, making a strong push into the NFC space. VeriFone Systems, who makes credit-card readers for cash registers, will play a large role in the announcement as the company plans to roll out more credit-card readers that enable consumers to pay by simply tapping their smartphones.  The Wall Street Journal, who broke this week’s news, wrote “The planned payment system would allow Google to offer retailers more data about their customers and help them target ads and discount offers to mobile-device users near their stores, these people said. Google isn’t expected to get a cut of the transaction fees.”

AMEX and Visa, on your phone: American Express has followed in Visa’s footsteps and released a payment service that allows Android and iPhones to be utilized for person-to-person (P2P) online payments. The service, named Serve, is also available through Facebook and Serve.com. CIO Magazine reported, “Serve also allows users to create and manage sub-accounts for friends and family members to, for example, pay a child’s allowance or a dog walker fee.”

Filed Under For Financial Institutions Tagged With mobile, mobile apps, mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile wallet, smartphone