Is Flow a Payment Disruptor?

The mobile payment industry is still waiting for a solution that will have consumers leaving their wallets behind to pay through their phones. At this point, it’s safe to say that 2013 will not be the year that this happens. However, 2014 may see an early contender for the mobile payments disruptor title in the Canadian “social commerce” company, Flow.

While it seems the Canadian startup has been pretty quiet about what they’re doing, Flow has some pretty big ideas.

A major issue with mobile payments is fragmentation. There are different apps for everything, from loyalty, to rating and review sites, to banking apps, to actually paying—most of these are currently happening separately. Having to use three separate apps to pay for something is hardly a way to get the ball rolling for the mobile payments industry, and Flow wants to fix this by combining all of these functions into one single app.

Even more, Flow doesn’t want to just be a payment app—it plans to be an entire marketplace. Looking to take on industry giants like Amazon and Ebay, Flow wants us to, as their CEO wrote in an article about the future of mobile payments, “imagine a single mobile app platform that allows customers to browse, read ratings, buy, check delivery status, rate and review an item or service or brand all on their smartphones, in real time.”

As a peer to peer system, Flow won’t have to worry about banks, or credit cards, or even POS systems. Users can simply upload cash into their account, and pay anyone else who also has an account. This seems very interesting, as a major road block for mobile adoption among merchants was having to update their POS systems to accept payments. Simply having to open an account online may not be too much of a hassle.

Flow will be rolling out its services in Canada early in 2014. And while it’s still far too early to tell if Flow will have what it takes to become the way to pay in the future, it certainly seems exciting.