The Broken Link - Digital Transactions

TRENDS & TACTICS
TRENDS & TACTICS
Viewpointe’s Upward Vector
(number and value of images shared and exchanged)
244 million
$320 billion
Long is skeptical about the real
momentum behind image sharing,
Fiserv deal or not, particularly as
compared with the progress of image
exchange. That’s understandable, since
she runs the largest image-exchange
network in the country. “Somebody
asked me, ‘Is image exchange going to
go away now,’” she says. “Absolutely
not.” SVPCO processed 340.9 million
items in December, up nearly threefold
from December 2006. Nationwide,
banks trafficked 1.03 billion images in
November, a 142% leap from November
2006, according to the latest statistics
from the Dallas-based Electronic
Check Clearing House Organization,
whose rules govern image exchange.
By contrast, image-share volume
is hard to measure. Viewpointe says
it processed 244 million images in
December, up 77% in a year (chart),
but it can’t break out image-share from
image-exchange activity. Viewpointe
is owned by Bank of America Corp.,
U.S. Bancorp, IBM Corp., JPMorgan
Chase & Co., SunTrust Banks Inc.,
and Wells Fargo Co. It serves not only
its five owner banks but also 14 other
financial institutions and processors,
offering both an image-sharing and
image-exchange product.
A stumbling block for image sharing
is banks’ long-held reluctance to
give up their proprietary archives.
Scott argues banks are more willing
to consider pooling their images these
138.2 million
• No. of items
• Value
$136 billion
December 2007 December 2006
days, given that the archive function
itself is a commodity business dealing
with a form of payment in which volume
is steadily falling. But Long isn’t
so sure. “Our banks are saying, ‘We
want to do image exchange—we’ve
already built our archives, and it provides
us with a point of differentiation,’”
she says.
In the end, the proof will be in the
statistical pudding. But neither model
of check electronification is likely to
bury the other. Notes analyst Meara:
“I think they’re going to co-exist for
the foreseeable future.”
Transactors
Mocapay: Mobile
Payments for Everyone
Source: Company reports
While mobile-payments services like
PayPal Inc.’s PayPal Mobile concentrate
on paying e-merchants, and
banks and wireless carriers work out
ways to use handsets to pay merchants
at the cashier, a startup in Boulder,
Colo., is getting set to do both.
Two-year-old Mocapay Inc.,
which has been handling transactions
for about 200 merchants in the Boulder
and Cincinnati areas, plans to
launch a national rollout of its service
this spring. And, while its clients are
all brick-and-mortar merchants right
now, it will likely start processing
transactions for Web sites in April,
says Lance Gentry, the company’s
chief marketing officer.
Called Feed until last year, the
company changed its name to Mocapay
as a sort of short code for “mobile
cash payment.” In January, it was
feverishly completing work on its processing
platform in an effort to support
an expansion in transaction capacity.
Its system is handling 50 to 100 transactions
a day currently, but Gentry
declines to make volume projections
with the rollout looming. “We have no
idea,” he says. “It could be gargantuan
if we do it right and really get some
national retailers behind this.”
It may be getting much of the
mobile-payments puzzle right already.
What distinguishes Mocapay is that
“they’re first to market with a deviceindependent,
carrier-independent, and,
most important, bank-independent
service,” that enables both physicalworld
and e-commerce payments,
says Richard Crone, who follows
mobile banking and payments for his
firm, Crone Consulting LLC.
Mocapay’s service operates via
short-message-service (SMS) transmissions,
and can be used on most
mobile carriers in the U.S. Consumers
use it by texting a PIN to Mocapay’s
short code. The processor returns a
message with the user’s account balance
and a one-time-use transaction
code. The consumer gives the code
to the cashier to complete the transaction
(or types it into a field on the
merchant’s checkout page).
At enrollment, consumers set up
a prepaid account, which they fund
with automated clearing house transfers
from their checking accounts.
Merchants enable their point-of-sale
terminals or systems with Mocapay’s
application programming interface
(API) when they sign up to accept
the service. The company has already
integrated its API with systems from
10 • digitaltransactions • February 2008