The Opportunities Posed By Mobile Payments

For most businesses out there, mobile payments are a “nice-to-have”, no real priority and the kind of thing that can be comfortably ignored or nodded at. However, new reports suggest that mobile payments can be a significant profit driver as well, and with worldwide mobile payment revenue poised to hit $930 billion by the end of this year, it’s a good time to look at how.

The word from the Forbes Finance Council spelled out the biggest ways that mobile payments will be a key revenue driver thanks to a fundamentally altered customer experience. As we’ve already seen with Nordstrom Local, the biggest of these will be the opportunity to open up new revenue streams. Further, the Forbes bunch expects faster checkout—which also improves the customer experience—along with improved marketing opportunities, greater personalization, and more.

Some down side will come with this, though; the Forbes group also looks for the eventual death of branch-level banking—Lance Scott of Bay Harbor Wealth Management noted “Start to get used to it now because soon you may not have a choice.”—and the “death of the pause,” a move which will essentially turn most every purchase into an impulse buy. Darryl Lyons of PAX Financial Group LLC calls this potentially “…an epidemic that steals from the wallet of the middle class.”

All of this is quite possible. I disagree with Scott, mainly because the bulk of bank customers right now want branches on at least some level, especially the baby boomers and what’s left of the Greatest Generation—some branches will go; we’ve already seen as much happen—and Generation Z seems to have at least some affinity for paper cash and physical locations. Lyons’ assertions about too-rapid commerce have some point, and it’s worth building a “pause” into your own shopping habits—no matter how easy the “buy now” button is—lest your impulses get the better of your budget, but this is nothing we haven’t heard before.

Regardless of the actual form these changes take, we can be sure that changes will happen, and in ways we probably can’t even consider yet. These changes noted previously are a big enough move for anyone, but be prepared; this could be just the start of the list, rather than the whole thing.