Tuesday, July 10, 2012


The End of Wallets As We Know It?

One of the most interesting emerging spaces in the Technology sphere is the digital wallet space. The digital wallet space is fascinating for multiple reasons, to begin with no clear winner has emerged yet and the success of digital wallets in the future has the potential to change the payment process entirely. If any or even some of these new mobile payment applications are successful the death of wallets as we know them will indeed occur. However, the success of these phone applications is not without significant hurdles. To begin with, shoppers must be able to clearly identify the benefits of ditching their previous methods in favor of these new mobile payment methods. Secondly, everyone from the banks providing the credit cards, to the telephone companies, to the retailers, who will be using the mobile payment technology, have different opinions on how to effectively proceed in this space. Until standards are set and agreed upon among all of these different players it will be difficult for Square or any of their competitors to become ubiquitous in the mobile payment space. Furthermore, while no one can deny the innovativeness of Jack Dorsey’s Square products, he does not have the built in customer base and scale that other companies such as,  Paypal and Mastercard, who have recently tried to enter the digital wallet space, have. One thing’s for sure, the next few years are going to be an intensely interesting and critical time period for the mobile  payment space.  I personally am looking forward to seeing if Square can differentiate itself enough from the seemingly endless competition and come out on top.

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