Mizuho: Faster US Mobile Payments Increasingly Order of the Day

Recently, Mizuho dropped an array of reports on us that added up to one key fact: speeding up the pace of payments in the US is taking on a whole new life, and becoming top priority for a range of firms. Mizuho’s report showed us how the industry is working to ramp up its speed thanks to several new developments.

First, there was the revelation that Poynt raised $100 million, a move that will help drive mobile payment terminal development. The combination of high-end payment terminals serving as all-in-one platforms and recurring mobile payment processing is proving an attractive draw to investors. With other, similar developments in the market—PayPal put $2.2 billion up to land iZettle and First Data put $12 million behind Salido—it’s one more point to demonstrate that this field is growing rapidly.

Further, Chase had word about its upcoming contactless cards using the Europay / Mastercard / Visa (EMV) protocol. With Visa noting that half of its face-to-face transactions were taking place at contactless terminals—it also projected 100 million contactless cards issued by US banks by 2020—it was clear that getting more contactless cards into the picture would be vital going forward.

Finally, word struck of the launch of the US Faster Payments Council. Its guiding precept: “a ubiquitous, world-class payment system that allows Americans to safely and securely pay anyone, anywhere, at any time and with near-immediate funds availability.” The Federal Reserve is reportedly seeking comment on a new interbank clearing and settlement system with an eye toward faster payments.

Speed seems to be the order of the day here as contactless systems grow, new payment terminals emerge, and even the government gets in on the act. The Hong Kong faster payments initiative, proved that speed is great, but not at the cost of security. While not all of these developments will necessarily improve speed, they’ll certainly help improve the overall functionality of the mobile payments market. We can have speed, and we need to to some degree to be competitive with cash and other payments tools, but we need to have it securely and with a sound infrastructure under it for ease of use.

Considering how safe mobile payments are already, though, improving speed couldn’t hurt, and may help the overall market’s trajectory.