Success and Setbacks in the Mobile Payment Card Industry

The credit card is pretty much ground zero for mobile payments; it’s where the whole concept got started and is still a major part of operations to this minute. Though with the rise of mobile payments well under way, credit card companies are also having a bit of a challenge in keeping up. Recently, the Money 20/20 show had several members of the credit card industry on hand to discuss the state of the card and where it’s likely going from there.

The event that brought these figures together focused on three key points: the growth of the 3DS standard that works to authenticate card-not-present transactions, issues in security for remote commerce, and the growth of tokenization, where account numbers are given a surrogate value known as a token which is used once then destroyed forever.

More specifically, the growth of 3DS has been steady, but the card industry called on developers to bring out the next version. With such an advancement in place, new services like digital wallet integration and app-based authentication could be brought into play alongside the standard browser-based operations seen in place today.

3DS 2.0 by itself, however, won’t be enough to provide the truly smooth user experience that customers want to see happen. That’s going to require advancement in the other two major fields discussed: secure remote commerce and tokenization.

Secure remote commerce required some of the most advancement, as several panelists noted that it was still causing problems with merchants looking to put it in play. Tokenization, meanwhile, is carrying on briskly. One of the biggest problems, meanwhile, is in educating retailers about what’s going on and what’s coming out.

That’s easily one of the biggest problems in any technology-heavy operation; making it clear what’s even available is eluding a lot of potential users, who are too busy keeping their current operations afloat to find out what potentially may be available elsewhere. It’s even worse for the consumer, who’s actively working on keeping food on the table to find out how credit cards work now.

Still, technological advancement is almost perpetual. There will be new developments routinely for as long as there are credit cards. We may not know what they’ll look like, but they will be there.