What Mobile Payments Can Learn from Debit Cards (circa 1995)

Contract-based payment systems have substantially supplanted the check-oriented payments contemplated by the Uniform Commercial Code over a half-century ago. Is there another commercial revolution waiting in the wings with mobile payments? In an insightful industry-focused piece at PYMNTS.com, Karen Webster shares observations on what enabled the mid-1990s success of debit cards and how those ingredients have not fallen into place (yet) today for mobile payment systems such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay.  Some of the key paragraphs:

Debit ignited by leveraging existing technologies that could be easily enabled at merchants – or that already existed at those merchants – to enable payment via a checking account using a plastic mag stripe card. Mastercard and Visa simply used the technology merchants already had and paid for while the EFTs subsidized the technology that merchants would need to use their cards. No one expected merchants to go sink money in a new technology out of their own pockets.

That has not been the case with NFC and mobile payments.

We’ve unfortunately spent the last 10 years forcing mobile payments into an in-store NFC technology mold that hasn’t knocked the socks off of consumers by simply substituting a tap for a swipe and asked merchants to foot the bill. We’ve let technology drive mobile payment’s ignition strategy, instead of the value created when a consumer with a mini computer in her hand encounters a merchant who’d like to use that computing power to help him sell more stuff to her.

NFC as an ignition strategy has also ignored the many, many dependencies that such a strategy requires to get the critical mass needed to achieve ignition: enough merchants with enough NFC-enabled terminals, enough consumers with enough of the right handsets or cards and enough of a value proposition for both to care. Absent all three, mobile payments ignition is left up to chance: the hope that one day *something* might happen to move things along, and at that point, there’d be infrastructure in place to support it.

This view of the payments market and place of innovation strikes me as largely correct, though I must admit some of my sympathy comes from having recently written here about what payments law can learn from its past.

Despite all the technological innovation sweeping the payments arena, past comparison of the law and the markets suggest that Solomon got it right with the observation that there really is “nothing new under the sun.”