This Week in Engagement Banking mobile payments are top of mind. According to Bank 2.0 author Brett King, we’ve been making them for years. You can read the myriad ways below. Meanwhile, Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, rarely absent from discussions on the future of mobile payments, isn’t being used in Apple’s iWallet. This, according to a post on The Cult of the Mac Blog. Additionally, BankNXT, in a post by Bradley Leimer, re-imagines banking applications and after reading Leimer’s post — maybe you will too!
Brett King’s Bank 2.0 Blog
Mobile Payments have been Mainstream for a while now…
If you believe the pundits, mobile payments are years away from being mainstream. But that’s not at all an accurate assessment of the state of the industry. Firstly, a mobile payment can be many things. There are seven primary models for mobile-enabled payments:
- SMS based transactional payments
- In-App Payments
- Direct Mobile Billing
- Mobile commerce and/or web payments
- Peer-to-Peer payments
- Virtual currency payments
- Contactless payments
As of today, it appears that around half of the developed world has made a mobile payment of some sort in the last 12 months according to this criteria – at a minimum an in-App purchase made from a mobile or iPad would qualify. Put that in perspective, more people made a mobile payment in 2011 than wrote a cheque in developed economies like the US, UK and Australia! More…
Bank Systems & Technology
How Banks Can Create A Customer-Centric Channel Experience
Getting the complete, cross-channel view of the customer is the goal of every financial institution, indeed of every company out there today. Banks strive to know how each customer interacts with them across mobile, online, call center, in the branch and every other channel, and present a seamless customer experience across all. Achieving a customer-centric cross-channel experience will be one subject Bank Systems & Technology explores in our upcoming digital issue focused on multichannel. I spoke with Colin Eccles, CIO of Roseburg, Ore.-based Umpqua about how banks can optimize the cross-channel. Eccles says it is Umpqua’s target to provide a consistent customer experience that expresses the bank’s brand and culture across all channels. More…
Cult of the Mac Blog
Why Apple’s iWallet Won’t Have Anything to do with NFC
Apple’s iWallet is already in your pocket. Ask what the next revolutionary feature for the iPhone will be, and NFC is a common answer. NFC — or near-field communications — is an ultra-low-power chip that allows two devices to communicate small strings of information within a couple feet of each other. Why’s it so revolutionary? The most commonly cited “magic” that NFC would bring to the iPhone would be the ability to use your device to pay for goods and services, just like a credit card. In other words, instead of pulling out your wallet to buy groceries, get onto the subway or pick up a MacBook at the local Apple Store, you’d just tap your iPhone against a point-of-sale terminal near the register instead. The NFC chips in both would communicate and you’d be on your way, no signature or PIN code required. More…
BankNXT Blog
Finovate, Simple and Re-Imagining Banking Applications
What problem are most banking applications really trying to solve? That’s what I have been thinking about for some time. I thought maybe last week’s Finovate would help me understand what we’re all trying to achieve. But I think I was wrong. It seems most innovations are coming from a place where founders are looking for exits, or established players are protecting their turf. In other words, it’s still all about the sliver of money on the edges of every transaction. Hasn’t Apple already proven that a simple, user-driven experience can drive not only profit but user delight? But I digress. Maybe it’s too much to tackle here, but maybe, just maybe, it’s time to re-imagine our applications.
What real problem do most banking applications try to solve? Seeing where we spend money? How we are doing against budget? Well, most Americans at least seem to be doing a good job of avoiding that just fine. Most online banking applications are focused on data from past events, rather than solve the need to understand the implications of certain spending behavior that is truly meaningful to future actions. Beyond the transaction, most applications outright ignore the important larger implications of how we spend, the matching of that data with lifestyle changes, or further refined life-changing needs. More…
VentureBeat
PayPal Handles 60% of Web Transactions, Leaves Google in the Dust
PayPal processes 60% of web transactions, Google is the fastest payment gateway, and some unlucky surfer had to wait over 92 seconds for his online purchase to complete. Those are only a few of the findings in New Relic’s study of the web’s most popular payment gateways. A payment gateway is the web equivalent of a modern cash register: It ensures that you are you, that you appropriately have access to your card, and that you can, in fact, be trusted to pay for the purchase you’re making. New Relic, a web app performance management company, studied 65,000 payment transactions by 21,000 web applications and came up with some astonishing findings. PayPal is by far the biggest payment processor on the web, at least according to this sample. During the test period, PayPal processed over 66,000 payments, more than three times as many as the nearest competitor, Authorize.net. Google Checkout came in fifth with just over 3400 payments. Google does win, however, in the speed category. More…
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