Finding the User

The Gimlet Eye

Last month, in a little essay called “So, Where’s the User?” we asked a question that’s often overlooked in all the sound and fury over mobile payments: Will the consumer ever show up in appreciable numbers to use a mobile device for payment, particularly at the physical point of sale?

We pointed out that there’s plenty of room for doubt. Most people are quite comfortable swiping a card—security issues aside. And they claim they’re not interested in incentives or rewards to use mobile. At the same time, the places that accept mobile payments remain a tiny minority in the retail landscape, years after Google Inc. and others introduced their first mobile wallets.

We concluded by noting that something needs to change if mobile is going to take off. It seems to us this “something” falls into three categories:

– Control

– User Experience

– Security

As payments analyst Steve Mott points out in Part 2 of his analysis of the situation in mobile (see Mobile Wallet Wars Part 2, this issue), what consumers crave—even if they don’t admit it—is control. Or at least the perception of control. This doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does have to be immediate.

So a mobile app that lets a debit card user check his balance before tendering the card, for example, could be a winner—so long as the answer comes fast and the information is in real time. Likewise with the ability to check up on rewards—again, in real time—and redeem them right then and there at the register, yielding an immediate payoff against the balance due.

This craving for control could explain why order-ahead apps are proliferating. They offer not only the element of controlling time and place, but also immediacy—the dish you ordered is available the moment you arrive at the restaurant, and already paid for.

The user experience can be crucial, as well. What can be easier than swiping a card? Well, with the arrival of EMV, mobile is going to be a whole lot more attractive than dipping a chip card in a terminal and waiting to pull it out. As for other comparisons with simple cards, see the two previous paragraphs.

Finally, there’s security. The industry needs to find ways to assure consumers that mobile is safe. Tokenization and cryptogram technology helps, so long as it can be clearly explained. So do fingerprint readers and tighter controls over credential loading at the banks.

Crack these nuts, and the user is much more likely to show up than if you keep pushing mobile solutions that do nothing to help sort out his  hectic life.

—John Stewart, Editor, john@digitaltransactions.net