Jim's Journal

I’ve been considering how we get to mobile payments, card-less transactions, call it what you will – but right now we are in a knife fight and its really starting to annoy me.

I’ve started this post a hundred times and each time I stop because things change so rapidly. The thing is – everybody wants to see mobile payments move forward but nobody wants to relinquish control or miss out or whatever. I can remember sitting in a mobile strategy meeting while working at Intuit a few years ago and we kicked around all kinds of ideas on how to move mobile banking forward. When we got to payments and device controls the conversation quickly turned to the same frustrating challenge: we have great ideas but the wireless carriers like Verizon and ATT&T will block access to certain aspects of the network unless they have control, the phone manufacturers can’t agree on a technology to allow for secure authentication or they simply don’t want to put in the hardware (back then it was all focused on NFC or RFID). And while we all in the software development space were considering user experience, we knew that the money was in the network and payment processing. And of course, the bankers, payment networks & processors who wanted to control that! We aren’t just talking chicken and egg here – we are talking something akin to a six member game of multi-chess (obscure reference to Asimov’s Nightfall, how appropriate) – what we really need is a collaborative game of Settlers of Catan – with the idea of multiple winners but still competitively capitalistic.

Take for example the new iPhone 5S – its got two new technologies that clearly make it a possible solution to this. Its the first thing I thought of when I considered both iBeacons and Touch ID together.  Yes – there are plenty of stories out there on how this new finger print technology isn’t really that different or secure. And I’m sure there are people out there ready to rip apart this communications standard leveraging Bluetooth Low Energy with wireless sniffers ready to steal transactions in mid flight.  I think, in the end, this will be a complex combination of technologies and partners that come together in a solution that seems simple to the end user.  Of course – this will only work if the credit card POS industry or cash registers or something implements iBeacons in their stores. But what if Square or Intuit GoPayment incorporate it as an option other than the card reader plug-in device, or PayPal adds it as a way to authenticate other than your email and PIN. Maybe if we all start paying for stuff with our finger print in the apple store and iTunes we will start to ask for it, and I wonder if there is some secret collaboration going on in Cupertino as I write this.

In fact Apple isn’t the first to come up with these types of solutions, pointing to the aforementioned Square and Intuit, the fact that Android phones do have a chip in them now, and consider Google Glass – are we all really going to walk around with goofy glasses on?  That’s what a smart company like Apple does; after all, come up with amazingly complex solutions that we all think are ridiculously obvious by the time we get them. And they are usually improvements on some other companies great idea that was just poorly, and complexly implemented. Anyone remember the first time you tried to explain how to use Napster or rip, save and move MP3 songs to a Rio player for one of your less tech-savvey friends? Only to see them a year later raving about their iPod saying “Why didn’t anyone else think of that?” happily paying for both the songs and the device!

I think we will get there, and I’m not the only one thinking of this – just do a search on this stuff and you will see. I’m counting on my good friends in the industry working on it – its why I love following this stuff.  Keep thinking differently.