Monday, August 08, 2011

Mobile Payments - A new Battlezone

Mobile payments is the arena for competition among credit card companies, banks and disruptive startups each trying to grab a chunk of this evolving payment channel.

American Express launched Serve, its new digital payments platform allowing users to make person to person payments (a la Paypal) via mobile phones. Its clear that the company is venturing into the mobile medium with full throttle as recent comments by the group's president highlighted the strategic nature of Serve and the will to invest in developing more features and launching internationally.

Mastercard is investing in NFC in partnership with Google, while Visa has partnered with Sqaure bought a payment platform (PlaySpan) and mobile payments company (Fundamo) to launch its own digital wallet platform.

Meanwhile, banks in the US, namely Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, launched a new electronic transfer system dubbed clearXchange that allows users to perform online transfers via email.

All these new entrants want to take away from the digital payment's incumbent (PayPal) success which is at 100 million customers with 8 million mobile users.

As all these mega players compete, innovation is bound to happen. For now, keep your phones close!


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