China
People’s Online Daily is reporting that online electronic payment transactions carried out on Chinese mobile payment providers is expected to be above 9 Trillion yuan, which is $1.45 Trillion in U.S. Currency. China’s mobile electronic payments in 2012 were at 800 billion yuan. That sets an increase in mobile payments made on smartphones and tablets at 265% over the previous year. With more and more Chinese citizens coming online analysts say that the steady growth in the mobile payment landscape is expected to continue to rise well into 2020. Last year, mobile electronic payment transactions rose 66% to nearly 3.7 trillion yuan.
India
Indian Express reports that electricity consumers in Mumbai will soon be able to make mobile payments for their bills. BEST or Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport will provide a service where customers will be able to make a mobile payment on their smartphone or tablet for their services. Digital wallets are on the rise in India with companies like Amazon and other e-commerce providers looking at such growth. M-commerce web sites are gaining traction in India as more mobile devices are coming online at a rampant pace.
Illinois
Mobile Cash Access, provided by Wintrust Financial will soon offer mobile access to ATMs and soon offer a mobile wallet solution. The ATMs will allow unique and secure QR Codes for authentication purposes. Once the QR Code is scanned the ATM will disburse the money requested. Paydiant will provide the mobile wallet application to be used in conjunction with Diebold brand ATMs. Marketing research shows that millennials, young banking consumers, want to use their smartphone digital wallet for ATM transactions. The new mobile transactions are seen as more secure than credit cards and debit cards as card skimming is negated and encryption is stronger on smartphones and tablets.
Payment Aggregators – Payment Service Providers
Unlike a merchant account, aggregators such as Square and PayPal are the merchant of record for their members credit card processing. For small merchants just starting out, these options seem intuitive. Small service providers, small average tickets or businesses that are just beginning see the solution as cost effective as there are no monthly fees involved but any sizable business has various issues with aggregator accounts. The lack of customer service, banking issues and deposit problems are among the few but that 2.75% rate on keyed electronic transactions is well above industry averages. As a business grows, those fees eat at profitability eventually causing them to investigate merchant account services. Aggregators also have a hard limit around $100,000 in processing and that averages out to $500 a day, so if a business can reach these numbers using an aggregator they soon find it to be working against them. With a quoted rate of 2.75%, $2,750 would be consumed on credit card processing fees, a 1% lower rate would make that just $1,750 adding $1000 to the bottom line. Considering a merchant services account comes at about $30 per month, it seems worth it to save that $1,000 for the business to use rather that donate it to credit card processing fees. Other transactions can be drastically lowered depending on card types, input type and business type. If you know of a business that uses an aggregate credit card processing account, they can save themselves a considerable amount on their rates & fees. If you would like to know more, contact National Transaction Corporation at 1-888-996-2273
