At APEX Europe: Mobile’s the Thing (May 19, 2014)
At the launch of the All Payments Expo Europe today in Marbella, Spain, speakers invariably turned to the topic of mobile, with strong emphasis on (and statistics to support) meeting the needs of merchants participating in mobile payments services and the consumers who use them.
The direct path to mobile payments ubiquity is no clearer on the eastern side of the Atlantic than on the western side. Innovation, however, is busting out all over in the effort to be the one whose solution has strong take-up and leverages the international trend toward omnichannel shopping. And, there’s no shortage of conversation about which group—telcos, financial institutions or technology companies—will “win” in the effort to “control” consumers and capture valuable payments and shopping data.
First, the needs that various speakers set forth:
- From Virtual Piggy, which focuses on the youth market: The combined spending potential for children ages 7-14 in the U.K. exceeds €2.8 billion (US$3.8 billion) per year. Seventy-four percent of kids in the U.S. use mobile Internet; no other category is a larger user.
- From PayPal, which is repositioning to a less PayPal-centric approach and actively seeking partnerships: The digital wallet is the glue across transactions, not merely payments. Omnichannel shopping is here: 30 percent of what’s purchased online is collected in the store.
- From flash’Npay, which is focusing on a retailer-centric mobile wallet: Seventy-one percent of consumers want to store their receipts and discounts on their mobile wallets, 46 percent want to keep secure information there, 41 percent want to pay with their mobile wallets in-store and 35 percent want to use their mobile wallets to get discounts.
How does prepaid figure in these discussions? Prepaid continues to be the building block for the mobile and digital possibilities because it’s clear that, for now and the long term, prepaid is a funding source of choice for many mobile applications and a physical card is a necessary accompaniment for mobile capabilities, particularly for in-store use.
There’s more to come from APEX Europe. Tomorrow, the Best-in-Category winners will be announced in 10 categories in Paybefore Awards Europe. And, there’s still time to cast your vote for the People’s Choice before 5 p.m. EDT.
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