Episode 12 - 19th October 2015

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 19th of October 2015, some trending stories today are:

TOP STORIES

The world of ATM might be seeing a merger. US ATM manufacturer Diebold is in takeover talk with Wincor Nixdorf in a deal that would put the German OEM at a value of US$ 2 Billion. It would be interesting to see if NCR will be pushed to make a counter offer. If the deal goes through, Diebold will get access to the lucrative European ATM market.

Financial Times is reporting that more than 2/3rds of economists expect the Fed to raise US interest rates before the year ends. All this despite the weakening economic data that came out and advisory from several banks that puts the Fed’s inflation target in doubt.

In a set of leaked documents that TechCrunch posted, Pinterest may be making its push into the payments arena. The documents which were used for soliciting investments show a forecast in revenue at $169 Million for 2015 and a whopping US$ 2.8 Billion in 2018. The promotional pins that Pinterest introduced, are morphing towards “Buyable Pins”.

The hacking incidents refuse to die down. Russian hackers infiltrated the server of Dow Jones in order to steal stock trading information. The US Secret Service, FBI and SEC are investigating the probe which has been going on for the last one year.

Contactless payments are coming to Dubai. Dubai metro commuters will soon be able to pay using a smart watch. The driverless metro since it launch has seen a huge influx of commuters, and payments (i.e. buying the Nol cards has always been an issue). Contactless payments will cut down drastically on the buy and board times.

Sony Pay? Yep! That might just be coming, but not to America anytime soon. Sony’s contactless payment technology known as FeliCa, can be either chip-embedded in smartphones or plastic cards. Sony plans to use this payment technology heavily in Asia, particularly in the transportation sector, starting in Indonesia.

In other short tidbits, China’s economy logs the weakest growth since 2009, Morgan Stanley’s quarterly profits drop 42 percents, sending its shares on a deep dive, and Myanmar curbs the use of foreign exchange by cancelling 1000s of licenses it had issued to business to use US Dollars in its economy as the domestic currency falters and tumbles downward.

PAYMENT OPINION

ApplePay may be coming to the Starbucks, but have no doubt, Starbucks mobile payments are coming to you. Starbucks is planning internally to now do trials on its dual-use card (that functions both as an open and a closed loop card), with credits interchange (i.e. your Starbucks credits can be loaded to the open-looped card). No word yet on when the trials are expected, but my source tells me most likely 2nd Quarter 2016.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

The Checkout process - has to be easy. Cart abandonment is a huge issue. In a webinar series by CA Technologies, 13% of merchants will experience cart abandonment due to complicated checkout process. For example in Europe, the SEPA mandate makes mobile commerce a pain, thus leading to a higher rate of cart abandonment. Merchant need to implement a mobile strategy that is geared towards frictionless buying experience rather than just juxtaposing their desktop experience on to a mobile. It just doesn’t work that way.

That’s all for today, my name is Faisal Khan and you were listening to the Payments Monitor.