I recently had the honor of participating in the “En route to a cashless 2.0?” session at The Money Event in Las Vegas. This discussion on the future of wearable payments technologies took place during Super Mobility Week, September 9-11, 2014.
During the session, I shared what I believe to be the must-haves of future mobile pay technology. Specifically, I outlined the four essential qualities of a desirable mobile payment application. A quality mobile pay app must be:
- Ubiquitous – Consumers will adopt mobile pay tools that allow them to pay anyone or any merchant regardless of the device.
- Easy – Only if an application is easier than swiping a card or scanning a barcode can a solution truly deliver value.
- Rewarding – If consumers don’t get “something else” out of it, they’ll have a hard time abandoning their traditional rewards cards.
- Secure – With payment data in high black-market demand, consumers are nervous to move money through any application they don’t trust.
I can’t over emphasize the importance of an app’s security. It’s essential to remember security has become table stakes for any new technology that deals in personal or financial data. Consumers are becoming increasingly leery of sharing their information, financial or otherwise.
At The Members Group (TMG), we recently developed a wearable payment application for Google Glass. The app, called See2Pay, lets consumers make small-dollar purchases at the point-of-sale with a swipe of the touch pad on the eyewear frames. The app is a product of the TMG Innovation Lab, a project devoted to building and testing consumer-centric digital payment solutions. The developer team leveraged an established person-to-person (P2P) network to build out the processing system behind the app. Transactions performed through See2Pay are routed through the Dwolla payments platform.
Another significant topic of discussion during The Money Event centered on the role of near-field communication (NFC) and tokenization in the development of wearables. TMG sees NFC and tokenization as two of the key drivers of mobile pay technology.
The value of mobile couponing was also discussed. Mobile couponing is one more value point pay technology providers will turn to as another incentive for mobile payment app use.
While it’s difficult to convince any new user group to try something for the first time, providers must be intentional about encouraging that first experience. Of course, they also need to have that experience nailed down so repeat use isn’t an uphill battle.
