MostContagious2012.pdf - Contagious Magazine

payMent / the
changing way we
pay we pay
Much of this change is driven by
smartphones. Mobile money is far from
being reliant on NFC, as the success
of Square demonstrates. The disruptive
startup has had a boost this year
following a $25m investment from
Starbucks. The Square Mobile Wallet
can now be used to pay at 7,000 Starbucks
stores across the US. And just
this month it announced that it’s processing
$10bn in payments annually.
As people learn to pay via multiple
devices, they are also becoming
more open to new units of exchange,
ranging from in-game virtual currency
to social currency.
www.google.com/wallet
squareup.com
Wallaby /
Wallets bursting with multiple credit
cards have become emblematic of
our times. According to Experian’s
‘National Score Index’, 10% of Americans
have more than ten credit cards.
Having so many payment options
means consumers are rarely using
them in the most efficient way – a phenomenon
that Wallaby aims to counteract
through the creation of ‘one card
to rule them all.’ The service solves the
conundrum of which credit card to
use to maximise savings and points by
letting people add credit cards to a centralised
system. When paying online or in
store, Wallaby automatically sifts through
the users’ cards, and crunches which one
should be used to maximise returns.
The way in which Wallaby helps consolidate
and organise multiple payment offerings
is analogous to Passbook (see Loyalty
section). It points to a future where payment
and loyalty increasingly converge and
become more frictionless.
www.walla.by
Barclays / Pingit
While banks tend to be known for making
life more complicated, Barclays in the UK
released an app in February that makes
transferring money incredibly simple. Pingit
lets users transfer up to £300 a day to
other people using just their mobile phone
number. The average order value of each
transaction is £70, higher than current
NFC mobile payment services, which are
usually capped at about £20.
Mobile banking has being growing exponentially
but this has largely come from
developing countries, where access to
formal financial services is lower than in the
West. Last year, for example, Visa aped the
success of mobile money transfer service
M-Pesa by introducing a mobile payment
service in Africa for people without bank
accounts.
Pingit has had an enthusiastic reception
in the UK, which could well set a precedent
for future mobile banking offerings in
this market. Within two days of the service
launching, 20,000 users had signed up and
it has now attracted more than 1.2 million
downloads. Barclays claims that a significant
amount of these are non-customers,
with Pingit now helping Barclays to acquire
more new customers than any of its other
online acquisition tools.
www.barclays.co.uk/pingit
Barclaycard / PayBand
While Barclays’ Pingit works via a mobile
phone, Barclaycard has been developing
frictionless payment solutions in more unusual
contexts.
At this summer’s London Wireless music
festival, Barclaycard debuted PayBand,
an NFC-enabled wristband that allowed
festival-goers to make cashless payments.
People signed up for a free PayBand,
loaded it with up to £250 a day, then wore
it around the festival site, negating the need
to carry extra cash or cards. To pay for items
from stallholders users simply swiped the
band on a card payment system.
PayBand is an imaginative evolution of
Barclaycard PayTag, a credit card sticker
that, when stuck to a mobile handset, enables
contactless payments. Both PayTag
and PayBand demonstrate that NFC isn’t
MOVEMENTs purpose sErVicE data technology design social biz sharing amplified screens augmented retail personalise new loyalty payment sbpf
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