Mobey Forum: MPOS Disrupts Payments Landscape (May 6, 2013)
Mobile point of sale (MPOS) technology, with its quick enrollment process, low-cost hardware and apps that enable mobile devices to accept card payments, is disrupting the payments landscape as it transitions from a niche solution for small merchants to a revenue generator for large retailers, according to a white paper from Mobey Forum.
“Little more than three years after the first wave of MPOS solutions hit the market, the technology is already redefining merchant card acceptance at the point of sale by rewriting the rules on who can accept card payments and also vastly simplifying the process of doing so,” said Matt Calman, chairman of the Mobey Forum MPOS Task Force and senior vice president and R&D executive at Bank of America. Mobey Forum is a bank-led industry association devoted to driving mobile financial services (MFS).
The white paper, “The MPOS Breakthrough: How the Power of Mobile Has Disrupted Payments,” is the first of three papers designed to raise awareness of the technology, encourage dialogue between stakeholders and explore the go-to-market processes of MPOS providers.
“Maybe one of the most important innovations here is the simplified pricing model—basically, pay per use around 2.75 percent per transaction for MasterCard and Visa transactions, with no minimums and no monthly maintenance,” Calman said during a Mobey Forum Webinar last week. The technology and business cases behind MPOS have created a groundswell of demand among merchants who were previously cash-only businesses, he added.
