The Future: Marketing & Mobile Payments

Everyone is talking about mobile payments. There's a race for the unknown start-ups in the space and many of the big names in finance as they race to find the right balance between the technology, acceptance and customer experience.

I worked this summer at American Express on a new product in the space called Bluebird (https://bluebird.com) which got me thinking about where the opportunity lies for marketers in this space. As a brand, Starbucks has made a huge push in trying to brand their own mobile payments experience. They've invested $25M in mobile payment acceptance technology, Square, and they've also worked hard to make their customer loyalty program mobile as well. (http://adage.com/article/digital/starbucks-invests-25-million-mobile-payment-provider-square/236587/).

On the marketing side, Google also jumped into the mobile payments industry purely from the advertising and ownership perspective. They've been successful in showing Click-through rates and other analytics, but struggled to provide advertisers with a monetary value of their advertising capabilities. Owning a google transaction, would allow them to solve their attribution problem, connecting ad directly to sale.

PayPal owns the largest P2P (peer 2 peer) market, where users can accept and send payments to other users. Again, owning the transaction.

So where to do marketers fit in? And what opportunities should marketers be eyeing? Well, first is in-app ads. As consumers shift to mobile payments through apps, it's likely that these apps will own a significant time and eyeball share with consumers. The second, is creating in-app experiences by integrating their brands. Similar to the Starbucks' lead, a brand could create an API experience that overlays on the mobile payment processing and app, such as tailored deals, or rebates to drive sales performance. Another is utilizing customer loyalty channels in the mobile space. Apple Passbook is one example of this. United and Amex have created API experiences in the Passbook app, and there is opportunity to do this with other mobile payments processors as well. Finally, own the mobile payment. In the case of Bluebird, the product is a joint venture with Walmart, which further pushes what is traditionally a retailer into the consumer finance space.