Fintech – Core Dump

mobilepmnt

There, I said it. It’s an inside joke amongst the payments industry folks to guess which year might be the year when Mobile Payments finally becomes mainstream. It may seem with the highly promoted launch of Apple Pay, we may have finally put a rest to the claim that 2015 is the year when mobile payments finally hit mainstream.

Maybe Not.

For all intents and purposes I feel Apple Pay, with its marketing momentum, managed to make the general public take notice of mobile payments. However, with Apple finally decided to get into the ring, it managed to make the other failed efforts combine forces together to finally put up a fight. I see the playing field with four major players.

Apple Pay with NFC
Google Wallet with NFC (Android Pay?)
MCX/CurrentC/PayPal/Paydiant Wallet
Samsung Pay (With Loop’s MST and NFC)

Each of these players have their own strengths to polarize the market in their own way. Lets dive in!

ApplePay:

Strengths: Best User Experience for making mobile payments in the current landscape. Pioneered the concept of tokenization and biometrics to provide a new easy way to pay. Brought all the payment networks and banks to execute a near textbook perfect launch.

Weaknesses: Merchant Adoption. As we see more merchants adopting NFC enabled terminals (and the EMV liability shift in 2015), the number of locations where you use Apple Pay will grow. However, don’t expect to use Apple Pay in your neighborhood Walmart anytime soon.

Not having any rewards programs to brag about is another limitation with Apple Pay.

Add to this the other side of Mobile phone pie, the Android user ecosystem who zealously hate anything Apple Makes. These folks will never use Apple Pay, no matter what.

Opportunities: As more of the newer iPhones get sold, Apple Pay will gain traction and people will try it atleast once to see how this works.

Threat: Industry analyst Cherian Abraham has been blogging about the fraud activities generated by ApplePay. Even though none of this has anything to do with the security measures Apple put in place in designing Apple Pay, the soft underbelly of the whole scheme is the Yellow Path for provisioning cards for users. Banks were forced to launch AP without much time to account for this newer security threats and that may slow some of the momentum.

My take: I would equate the launch of Apple Pay to Tesla’s Model S launch. Both were revolutionary products in their own respect. They broke the convention in their areas where common wisdom dictated that it could not be easily done. However, any first generation product there may be some quality issues which may get ironed out as future versions are released. Apple Pay is surprisingly a solid offering for v1 and it can only get better.

2. Google Wallet with NFC (Android Pay?)

I don’t even know where to start with this. Google Wallet has languished forever mostly due to Google’s approach in not building partnerships with the players in the field. Finally the stars aligned for Google Wallet after the Apple Pay launch and lit up the much needed fire in their back to get their act together. Google was able to broker a partnership with Softcard and provide its new wallet offering as an API.

Strengths: Launching Android Pay as a payment API (See Sundar Pichai’s remarks here) is a wise move. This allows Google to open up the API to device manufacturers and developers to build wallets which may result in mainstream adoption. Apple’s walled garden approach would have never worked for Google in the first place. Android has a healthy user base in US who may try this service.

Weaknesses: Design by committee never produces mind blowing user experiences. Apple Pay set a very high bar(See Tim Cook launch Video here). I cannot imagine how the Android Pay UX can be any simpler than this given the fact that it has to work on a multitude of devices made by different manufacturers. The rev. share scheme Google has promised the Telcos to pre-install Google Wallet in newer handsets sounds like something which needs to be vetted after product launch to see how successful it may be in the long run.

Opportunities: Android has an 80% worldwide market share (source). With an open API approach, Google is betting on sheer volume of its users to make this a success. When you thrown in enough magic potion in the cauldron, you never know what may come out 🙂

Threats: Not having the first movers advantage sometimes may come back and bite you. Apple Pay was able to alleviate this shortcoming with an amazing UX. With Android’s open model and fragmented ecosystem, the success of Android Pay may not be imminent. If history is any indicator, the ARPU(Avg. Rev. Per User) for Android is one quarter of iOS users (according to Benedict Evans analysis here).

My Take: Android Pay maybe late to the party but it surely provides an alternative for Apple Pay. How successful this may be is something we will have to wait to see.

3. MCX/CurrentC/PayPal/Paydiant Wallet

Its hard to analyze a wallet only a few have used in Beta. However, the PayPal acquisition of Paydiant came as a surprise and caught most of us off guard. We well knew MCX was working with FIS/Paydiant to use their QR code technology to payments. The QR-Code premise was very promising when all of the industry pundits declared NFC dead (including me). Add some Apple juice and suddenly we see a re-animated NFC becoming the de-facto payments standard.

The QR-code method of payments is still not bad. We use it in Starbucks everyday and most people do not have any issues paying using QR-Codes. However the entire premise of CurrentC wallet which tries to remove payment networks from the picture (atleast in the first iteration) seems like a dicey proposition for a successful launch. From a consumer point of view, I do not understand why a customer would be motivated to link their bank accounts to save interchange fees for a merchant.

4. Samsung Pay (With Loop’s MST and NFC)

Talk about bad timing and possibly some buyer’s remorse. Samsung acquired LoopPay which would provide out of the box support to use existing POS terminals using the Magnetic Secure Transmission technology. While many rumored a marriage between these two companies could have provided a great mobile wallet in Samsung phones, this comes a year too late. With the EMV liability shift fast approaching, many merchants are upgrading their terminals. The concept of swipe as we know may go the way of dodo pretty soon. (This reminds me of Blu-Ray as a technology. I wonder how many people still buy Blu-Ray players now that streaming is becoming the most preferred way to consume content?)

Naming this technology as Samsung Pay is also not a great move in my opinion. For the hardware chops they have, Loop technology could have been made into a hardware chip which Samsung could then sell to any of the device makers thereby securing their investment and guaranteeing a longer shelf life with strength in numbers . With Google announcement of Android Pay API, I am just not sure how Samsung would promote their offering when they will also have to install Google Wallet.

Conclusion:

So, I hope, my dear reader, if you have come this far, you probably know how big of a cluster is the current mobile payments landscape in US. I don’t even want to imagine the free technical support we have to provide our families and relatives once every one of them gets their hands on a pay with a phone thingamajiggy. So good luck.

For my money, I can surely bet 2015 is not the year of mobile payments 😉

I rarely use PayPal. The only times I use PayPal is to buy from Internet merchants who I have never dealt with before. I never use their money movement feature. That being said, a couple of months ago I decided to add a new bank account to PayPal.

A typical way to setup a new bank account for ACH is utilizing the trial deposit method of account verification. With this method, the entity which likes to make the ACH linked setup, sends two micro trial deposits usually less than a dollar to the bank account and asks you to verify this amount. This process takes typically a day or two due to the underlying limitation of the ACH technology which uses batch files in this day and age to settle transactions.

Recently a newer way to verify bank information has been floating around – this is called Instant Verification where the entity (like Paypal) utilizes the online banking login information to confirm if you really are the owner of the account you are trying to link. I have used this method in a few places and 99% of the time, unless you are trying to link to one of the big banks, this never works. (In which case I fallback to the trial deposit method).

So when I set up a new funding bank account with PayPal using this new Instant Verification method, I was surprised to see it was able to connect to a small local credit union account. However I realized a few months later, instead of linking the checking account, PayPal ended up linking the savings account. (Disclaimer: I am not sure who screwed up here, PayPal or the aggregator they use or my credit union’s core system).

During holiday shopping season I used Paypal a little more than normal. This ended up deducting from my savings account (which didn’t have much balance on the first place since this bank account is purely used for everyday spend).

At one point, the savings account over drafted and PayPal hit me with a $20 fee for the failed ACH transaction (even though I have a backup credit card setup within Paypal to fallback in the event of ACH failure.

Transaction from my bank on 12/23:

Not wanting to deal with PayPal’s customer service, I decided to remove this bank account from PayPal and just leave it only with a credit card as funding source. When I try removing the bank account, I get an error message that “You have a pending transaction – you cannot remove this bank account”.

I give PayPal a full 5 day window and try removing this account and I got the same error message again. To add insult to injury, I can’t seem to locate the $20 fee or the Pending transaction within PayPal Account Activity Section.

Here is PayPal’s account history where you can’t see the $20 fee or a Pending transaction:

I even tried the Ugly Sister version (Classic Site) of PayPal to see if this Pending Transaction and hidden fee are visible – no luck.

I can’t believe PayPal, a massive platform with so many customers would suck so bad on User Experience. I wrote to PayPal Customer Service, lets see what that response would look like 🙂

Update 1 on Jan 1, 2015.

PayPal sent me a generic email about how to add and remove bank accounts when I specifically asked them to remove a bank account. Auto Responders are not cool – especially when you deal with customer’s money.

I tried moving some money from the PayPal account to my bank account. It seems like the transaction went through but this is the confirmation screen I got after the transaction. I got an error message to check my card details followed by a big green check mark possibly indicating that the money transfer was initiated. What does this even mean?

Screenshot:

To facilitate this move, I had to increase my monthly transfer limit. PayPal cleverly suggests that we add another credit or debit card to do this. I added a new card to increase my limit. PayPal charged me an amount of $1.95 to validate if the card really belongs to me. In the transaction memo they embed a 4 digit code which needs to be used to validate that the credit card belongs to me.

Once I finished adding the card, I got a realtime mobile SMS alert from my FI and I added the 4 digit code to confirm that the card was mine. After that I was able to move the money from PayPal to the bank account. However, when I viewed the account register again, instead of seeing a credit and a debit for the $1.95 which PayPal posted, I see two credits to my account. SMH.

Does this company even do any Quality Assurance Testing on the code they push to production?!?!

Tag Archives: Fintech

2015 is not the year of Mobile Payments.

Paypal needs to leave 1998 and move on to 2015.