Starbucks owns mobile payments.
No one else even comes close. So with the predicted launch of a white-labeled mobile payments solution from the Seattle-based coffee giant in 2016 — possibly to be called Star Pay — will Starbucks become the mobile payments system of choice for merchants?
Probably not. While Starbucks‘s system is perfectly tuned to its own business, it is likely less well-suited to the needs and customers of other businesses, according to Matt Harris, managing director of fintech at Bain Capital Ventures.
For a better bet in the broader world of mobile payments, try the newly launched Walmart Pay from Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart.
Harris and Brian Roemmele, CEO of Pay Finders, discussed mobile payments and more with Bank Innovation last week. (The full audio of the conversation, which also touched on startup valuations and fintech IPOs, is here.)
Throughout history, innovations in payments have come from retailers, said Roemmele, so it should come as no surprise to see Walmart, Target, and Kohl’s getting into the mobile payments game. Starbucks, of course, has been in the space for years, and is doing very well. Its loyalty card translated very smoothly into the mobile world, and mobile payments now account for 21% of in-store sales.
Walmart Pay is also expected to be released for use by other companies at gas stations and fast food restaurants in 2016, and may be aimed at providing mobile payments to the underbanked, according to Roemmele. If Walmart convinces a significant proportion of its customers to adopt its mobile payments platform and use it elsewhere, it could be a significant driver of mobile payments among that (huge) portion of the population that will never use Apple Pay.
Star Pay is also expected to be positioned for quick-service restaurants. But Harris doubts Starbucks’s solution will translate well to other merchants:
Starbucks has a unique place in the retail pantheon as a very frequent purchase with wildly high margins and a very high-end demographic. Those three things taken together give them the ability to reward users for using their app and create habituation in a way that I think very few other retailers have.
Harris is furthermore skeptical of mobile payments generally beyond quick-service restaurants. The bulk of retail-specific payments have been about credit extension, he said, and that does not seem to be part of retailers’s mobile payments strategy. Walmart Pay is not likely to offer significant rewards as part of value proposition, so what will make users adopt it instead of using their card? Target, with its 5% off for use of its Red Card, can expect to have a smoother time moving users to mobile.
As for Starbucks, it is hard to see what magic it could produce for retailers outside of its sweet spot, and close competitors have already offered initiatives of their own for some time. In any event, 2016 will see more retailers entering the mobile payments space, and new value propositions tailored for specific customer groups. And the end result will likely not be a winner-take-all situation, but various successful hybrids of the technologies now jockeying for adoption.
Read about mobile payments at the end of 2015: Holidays Were Huge for Digital Payments, Preliminary Data Shows