SAN DIEGO — A VeriFone Inc. exec said it best:
“A boring party called payments turned into the biggest thing out there,” David Talach, vice president of global product marketing at VeriFone, told Bank Innovation.
Naturally with the payments hype, nearly every day brings a new product or feature. To declutter the debuts — and satiate some curiosity — Bank Innovation made the rounds at last week’s Electronic Transactions Association’s annual meeting & expo and discovered a theme smacking us in the face. Innovation is flooding around mobile couponing at POS, showing NFC, mobile marketing waits for no one. Here’s a sampling of what new products/features we discovered from six vendors while attending ETA:
SparkBase Inc.: Beyond scoring the technology innovation award from ETA, Founder and Chief Executive Doug Hardman spent a few minutes giving a shout out to his new mobile platform during a panel. In short, Paycloud Mobile Wallet — the name of the latest launch — is a smartphone-enabled mobile wallet for loyalty and couponing. Merchants plug in the Paycloud sensor into their terminals so they can talk to customers’ smartphones and create digital loyalty and gift card programs. The end goal is to increase customer stickiness as well as attract new customers and let those pesky plastic merchant membership cards finally go poof.
Global e Telecom Inc.: Though no specific new tool was named during the payment processing tradeshow, COO Chris Brundage told attendees during a session that “mobile is a focus for us, and we see growth [in the channel].”
The company provides merchants payment processing services, among other products.
VeriFone Inc.: VeriFone Systems Inc.’s newest POS offering underscores its faith that more “intelligent” checkouts will serve as the place for merchants to score more revenue as well as strengthens its position in the mobile payments and couponing scene.
Paymedia Solutions, VeriFone’s new subscription-based service for small- to medium-sized merchants, strives to make physical checkouts more meaningful to consumers by letting merchants accept emerging alternative payments, along with traditional payments, and integrating them with digital media. The combination of payments with digital media means retailers can integrate online services like digital coupons, loyalty, location-based social media while the consumer checks out. Translation: Perhaps a card swipe will lead to a customer receiving 50% off a Yoga lesson.
VeriFone’s vision of transactions equates POS to beachfront property — hence the more advanced debut — and we’re certain this is one of many deployments that will make checkouts smarter. New York taxis are probably next to get the upgrades.
Paymedia will be available in June through a number of resellers.
Street Savings: With Street Savings, a mobile marketing provider, inking a deal with Payment Alliance International, a electronic payment processing provider, even the ATM is getting some coupon action innovation. Why? Because of the partnership, consumers will soon be able to opt-in to receive mobile coupons from merchants via the ATM.
The work that remains to be done is beta in the field, Pal Flagg, Street Savings’ CTO, tells Bank Innovation. He adds that effort will happen this year.
“Our position is we want to be wherever someone can sign up,” Flagg says.
PAI manages more than 50,000 ATMs nationwide.
Regarding NFC, The Street Savings execs view the technology as still a ways off. “It takes a lot of sales work to a lot of businesses that are small,” said Flagg, adding it “will take years” before NFC finds some sort of ubiquity. Still, Street Savings “plans to be at the table when NFC goes down,” he said.
Capital Access Network Inc.: Glenn Goldman, president and chief executive, alerted Bank Innovation that finding more unique data is on the company that offers small- to mid-sized businesses financial products and services’s near-term radar. The Groupons and EBays of the world have unique access to small businesses and capture unique information, which may have relevance in underwriting loans, said Goldman. Take an EBay/PayPal seller rating. The rating might be “interesting” to make capital decision in underwriting, he said. “We are looking closely at unique data in ecosystems,” Goldman said.