Areas Include:
MasterCard, American Express, Discover
A new report shows that American Express, MasterCard, Capital One, Discover and Western Union were focusing on electronic transaction processing. While American Express Company (American Express) recently announced a new executive vice president and a new chief financial officer. Their experience is expected to bolster and drive commerce in some of the emerging digital transaction technologies but so far not much is on the table. MasterCard, however, has successfully launched MasterPass which is MasterCard’s digital wallet service that enhances commerce and customer loyalty while making electronic transactions more seamless to the electronic wallet owner. Keeping new digital transactions familiar to the customer is a big concern as new payment options are increasing. With a digital wallet, customers credit card data and shipping or billing address information is stored in the device or the digital wallet software so that the customer can easily checkout whether it is an e-commerce transaction an m-commerce (for mobile commerce) transaction. Smartphone and tablet users can even leave their credit cards behind and use a smartphone to make electronic payments using NFC (Near Field Communications). These ‘Tap to Pay’ solutions are also working on ways to reward customers with coupons upon a successful transaction processing. Discover and Western union seem more focused on providing digital wallet solutions as they are late coming into electronic transaction processing.
Mobile Point of Sale – MPOS
Local retailers are realizing that Point of Sale applications designed for tablets and smartphones are less expensive than traditional POS applications and hardware but they also extend sales to anywhere on the planet. MPOS is Mobile Point Of Sale, and that means a laptop or tablet device that uses an app for the device or a web interface to get real time data on inventory levels, product details and much more. With an MPOS system in place orders can be entered anywhere in the world. Couple that smartphone or tablet device with a credit card reader and cash register drawer and you can sell and close an electronic transaction anywhere, any time. They’re also a lot less bulky than traditional POS systems. There is an additional environmental effect to electronic payments in that receipts and confirmations can be sent via text messaging or e-mail and appointments and sales information can be sent to the customer with zero paper involved.
M-Commerce is Mobile Commerce
First there was e-commerce or electronic commerce, which was a shopping cart web site that could accept credit card information to complete an order online. Customers could come to the shopping cart site, browse products and options for those products and finally check themselves out and have the product delivered to where they would be. Today mobile commerce or mcommerce is the ability for web sites to reformat the page based on the size of the screen being used. So a shopping cart site could show up one way if a customer used their PC and web browser. A different arrangement of the shopping cart elements would be rendered on a tablet device like the iPad or an Android Tablet. Still another view could be optimized for smaller devices like smartphones from Android to the Apple iPhone. From the customer perspective, they can browse the e-commerce site on any device and it will seem familiar to them, or they can look a merchant up on the go and browse the e-commerce site, pay via their smartphone, laptop or tablet and pick up merchandise at the stores location. Expect a lot of innovation in the e-commerce or m-commerce arena as well as tap to pay with NFC enabled smartphones and tablets.
Person to Person Money Transfer
Money transfer is an area just now being looked into. Although not suited for commerce especially e-commerce or m-commerce, money transfers allow one user to transfer funds directly to another user. This may eventually replace cash as the primary method of person to person transfers of funds electronically. PayPal is currently the leader in this area because any two people with PayPal accounts can already perform those transfers. Soon other merchant account services providers will be able to host transactions on this much smaller level. Services such as Google Wallet or ISIS and possible even MasterCard Digital wallet may soon allow processing your friends credit card directly into their bank account.
Gift Card, Loyalty Card and Digital Rewards
Gift cards were all the rage not long ago. They increase customer loyalty because the funds can only be spent with a single merchant, but they were great for the gift buyer because they could be used to buy any item the merchant sold. A gift card can also be re-loaded to further it’s usefulness and meant the customer would return for future purchases. These ‘loyalty cards’ are being replaced thanks to digital wallet capabilities that can hold customer rewards on the device itself. In addition to holding funds, merchants can offer coupons upon a completed electronic transaction. These electronic coupons or digital loyalty reward cards are stored in a digital wallet and can prompt the user on a future purchase to allow them to use the reward or decline its usage.
The future of electronic payment processing is looking bright. Already projections are being beaten and expected to rise for at least the next 5 to 10 years dramatically. As smartphone and tablet users become more acquainted with processing electronic payments in new ways, adoption will increase and we will see new consumer behavior when it comes to how digital payment transactions are processed.