Isis Official Gives a Broad Peek at Product Plans for 2014, Following National Rollout

A wider array of payment cards and more finely targeted advertising are among the features and capabilities the Isis mobile-payments venture previewed on Thursday for possible launch in 2014, following the venture's national rollout. In pulling back the curtain, however, the venture, which is backed by mobile-network behemoths AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless, did not give a more specific date for when the new featrues will be introduced.

Isis began a pilot just over a year ago in Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, and earlier this year announced it would expand nationally using what it has learned from the trials. The venture, which depends on near-field communication technology to allow consumers to link its wallet app with point-of-sale readers, competes with other aspiring national wallet products like Google Wallet and PayPal Inc.

Speaking Thursday at a conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., organized by Isis and aimed at acquirers and developers, Ryan Hughes, chief marketing officer at Isis, said the Dallas-based venture would like to add debit, private-label, and gift cards to the mix of payment cards in its wallet. “We continue to talk to the banks, and we’re very hopeful to be able to bring debit cards into the market,” Hughes told the audience. He implied that other card types are more definite. “You’ll see private-label cards and gift cards from us in 2014. You’ll see much more [payment] content from us,” he said.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and American Express Co. are currently the only issuers participating in Isis. A chief source of revenue for the venture is the fees it levies on issuers to be included in the wallet.

With respect to non-payment functions, Isis expects to upgrade and fine-tune its app’s marketing capabilities. These moves will include more sophisticated ad targeting and a contextual capability that would allow marketers to detect and serve up offers to nearby users, with the marketers’ locations shown on a map on the device screen, Hughes said.

Issuers, too, will have a messaging capability as their cards are shown on-screen that will allow them to differentiate themselves and present inducements to use their cards.

Thursday’s preview complemented a product outline for the national launch that Isis chief executive Michael Abbott revealed a month ago at the Money2020 payments conference in Las Vegas.

Still, exactly when in 2014 the new features will become available remains unannounced. The mobile-wallet business is becoming increasingly crowded. Not only have powerful players like Google and PayPal entered the business, but all the players face potential competition from a mobile-payments service called Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, being organized by many of the nation’s largest retail chains.

At the same time, Google last week created a potential opening for yet more wallet offerings with the release of its Android 4.4 operating system for smart phones. The OS update, dubbed KitKat, includes a feature called host card emulation that decouples NFC payments from a phone-based chip known as the secure element. The move could allow Google as well as a broad array of other companies to offer wallets without paying fees for access to that chip.

Asked later in the conference about the Google development, Hughes said it won't change Isis's strategy, “From Isis's perspective, it's business as usual,” he said. But he added Isis would not oppose offering host card emulation as an option under certain circumstances. “We're looking at it with interest, [but] we're beholden to the industry to make that decision,” he said. “If a new technology comes along and the payment networks find it secure enough, what mobile-payment company wouldn't implement it?” Currently, the card networks have not certified host card emulation.

Nor would Hughes address plans beyond 2014. “On 2015, we’ll get back to you,” he said.