Mizuho Tackles Tour to Check Out Mobile Payments Landscape
Recently, Mizuho engaged in the West Coast Connected Commerce tour, and by way of its analyst Thomas McCrohan, brought back some insights about the mobile payments market. Considering that the tour included elements from PayPal, Square, Toast, Visa, and several experts on Chinese mobile wallets, there was definitely plenty of industry firepower on this tour. Now, the reports are coming back, and as we were tipped off about by Mizuho, there’s a lot to say about this industry of ours.
Disruption at point-of-sale (POS) is real. An increasing number of low-cost tablet computers are making their way to businesses, and businesses are increasingly putting these tools to work to create a whole new way to pay at the register. In fact, Mizuho notes that it’s the legacy system providers, like MICROS, that are falling behind in this field.
Mizuho also brought back insights on specific players in the field. Visa, for example, was enjoying “continued momentum in Europe,” while PayPal was poised to see a lot of new effort in bank partnerships that would bear fruit in the next quarter or two. Square, meanwhile, is proving the leader in the field with a 32 percent market share of small and medium sized business (SMB) installations; the next closest is Clover at nine percent. The Square Register system is proving a useful addition to the field.
Mizuho even went so far as to increase price target values for every firm involved; PayPal’s new PT is $85, while Square’s is $95 and Visa’s is $162.
Just looking at some of the high points from the Mizuho report makes it clear that mobile payments is a high-stakes field of endeavor, and we’re likely to only see more such moves in this field as newcomers try to get their own price targets ramped up as far as even PayPal’s. This is actually great news for the consumer, who will have plenty of choices to work with as firms frantically pursue market share. This could even result in more direct reward from the companies involved, like we’ve seen with PayPal working with banks to produce rewards programs.
The stage is set for quite a fight in the mobile payments market to come, and in the end, it should be the consumer who wins.