September 30th, 2013 by Elma Jane
Future of Marketing Lies in Mobile Payments…Why?
Marketing and payments might seem like strange bedfellows to the average retailer, but in fact, they are converging rapidly to bring more value to consumers and merchants alike. Here are 10 reasons why the future of marketing is inextricably linked to payments innovation:
1. Cross-Platform Acceptance
Better yet, these targeted offers can be acquired and redeemed through different mediums…online, offline and mobile…and utilized interchangeably. This makes life easier on the consumer and thus makes them more likely to engage with new loyalty and rewards programs. Moreover, as the Internet and mobile solutions continue to merge, the digital “wallets” that many of us use online today (think PayPal) are, logically, moving to our phones. When these payment and marketing applications are accessible from the same device, customers can seamlessly receive pertinent offers and pay for goods at the same time in the same place. Other apps will give consumers the ability to shop in one medium and buy in another, simplifying omni-channel marketing to affect commerce across all channels. This kind of convenience and value is a win for both customer and merchant.
2. Loyalty and Rewards get Simpler
The reality is that it’s much easier to issue and redeem loyalty rewards, gift cards and discounts when they are integrated into the POS experience and don’t require customers or merchants to alter the existing in-store purchase or checkout stream. You can see these simplified applications already in practice at chains like Starbucks, as well as independent merchants that use systems like LevelUp.
3. Merchant adoption
The payment technologies that succeed will be the ones that are ultimately adopted by merchants, which in turn will lead to consumer usage. Key technologies that will likely facilitate widespread adoption of mobile payments…either proactively because merchants want to see what they can offer them, or passively as they upgrade devices…include:
EMV (chip and pin), which will force merchants to update their POS systems, likely catalyzing them to update all points of interaction.
NFC – Cloud Computing – Geofencing – QR Codes and even Basic Bar Codes
4. More Value for Consumers
And for consumers, the convergence of payments and marketing should deliver highly valuable deals, offers, comparisons information and more, ultimately providing drastic improvement of the buying and shopping experience.
5. More Value for Merchants
So what does this value look like? For merchants, the convergence of payments and marketing should bring in new customers, increase sales from existing customers, and provide more customer data. It should also create a more streamlined multi-channel experience so consumers have little barrier to adoption.
6. No Single Technology will Win
These new technologies introduce an interesting question: What should merchants do to prepare for this brave new world where payments and marketing collide? For one, merchants should avoid betting on any one technology. In fact, the POS needs to morph into something a little more complex, becoming instead a POI, where a broad variety of payment types, loyalty programs, coupons and more can be redeemed. Merchants should be in a position to choose what types of payment they want to accept and in what medium, and not be limited to fixed payment tenders.
When the convergence of marketing and payments will happen
The increasing adoption of mobile payments by merchants and consumers, when combined with new POS environments, will jump-start the convergence of marketing and payments. However, we’re still in the early stages.
Mobile commerce technologies are widespread but still working to gain traction from consumers en masse. Additionally, merchants haven’t yet felt the need to upgrade their POS systems to accept mobile payments
However, the October 2015 EMV Liability Shift, a date set by Visa and MasterCard for certain charge-back liabilities to fall to the merchant unless they have upgraded to EMV-capable POS systems, is likely to push merchants to upgrade their systems.
Once merchants begin to upgrade these POS systems, the smart ones will take the opportunity to add more features and functionality to the systems, including the ability to accept payment…and marketing-driven solutions from mobile handsets. That’s when we’ll see the value of two-way communication between merchants and consumers dramatically change the shopping experience and bring payments into the marketing mix.
7. Smartphone Adoption is Speeding Up
Consumers’ mobile phones are already equipped to deliver highly valuable offers, and adoption is increasing at a rapid pace. Smartphones bring with them new app technologies that include not only mobile payments but also loyalty and rewards programs that are designed to drive preference for stores, good and services.
8. Targeted Offers and Single-Use Applications
Of course, these solutions are still in their infancy. Elegant single-use applications, such as mobile wallets and gift cards, will soon grow to provide highly targeted offers that take into account everything from shopping preferences to location, providing incentives as a customer walks the aisle of a store. Just about every player in the payments ecosystem is thinking about these new commerce technologies. The winners will be those that demonstrate clear value for both the merchants and customers.
9. The “POS” is now a “POI”
A point-of-sale (POS) solution used to be a place where goods were purchased and money traded hands. Usually, this took the form of a cash register or credit card machine. Though these still exist, a wave of new value-added marketing services, such as targeted offers, discounts and highly valuable loyalty applications, have led to the transformation of the POS into a point-of-interaction (POI), a place where consumers and merchants meet to exchange value for value.
10. Two-way communication
When embedded in smartphones, new technologies…like near-field communication (NFC), QR codes, geofencing and cloud authentication solutions…allow for two-way communication between the consumer and the POS solution, enabling merchants to deliver coupons and offers directly to customers’ mobile phones through targeted integrated programs.
Posted in Digital Wallet Privacy, e-commerce & m-commerce, Mobile Payments, Mobile Point of Sale, Smartphone Tagged with: bar codes, cloud, device, EMV, handsets, innovation, loyalty, marketing, merchants, mobile, nfc, offline, omni-channel, online, payments, PayPal, phones, POI, point of interaction, POS, qr codes, rewards
September 10th, 2013 by Admin
Verizon annually releases it’s Data Breach Investigation Reports which probes data breaches in various industries and studies the nature of fraud reported by merchants and other agencies. In the past Verizon has worked with the U.S. Secret Service, now the information gathered on the electronic payment breaches have expanded to Police Central e-Crime Unit, Australian Federal Police, the Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit, and the Irish Reporting & Information Security Service in addition to the United States Secret Service.
One area that Verizon broke out and performed independent studies on was the healthcare industry. In 2010 the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HI TECH) Act included a provision to report healthcare and medical data breaches to a variety of outlets including the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Medical record protections keep the casual cyber criminal at bay but the majority of security data breaches are in large part targeted at information attackers can profit from. The data cybercriminals target most often includes health insurance data, personal and electronic payment transaction data. Hardware is another assett that is targeted both because of the data on the hardware and the cost of the hardware itself.
Remote data breaches on health care providers were typically carried out through some form of hacking or malware. That is consistent with other industries in the report and is considered the favorites among cybercriminal organizations. Exploiting of default or guessable credentials rang in at the top of the chart. Of those, point of sale payment systems and desktop computers were the highest targeted areas of the health care industry. Although electronic medical records and transcriptions stored on file and database servers were a target, those criminals were more likely interested in indentity theft and fraudulent loans than what was actually in any individuals medical records.
Point of sale payment terminals are the most targeted assett with POS servers and gateways as the second most targeted. Like all other sectors, professional criminals tend to follow the money trail and that ends up being at POS payment systems. So much so that even desktop computers and emails try to get malware onto medical systems to render security policies inneffective. To find out how to better protect medical and healthcare records from cybercriminals and data breaches read the reports here and here.
Posted in Best Practices for Merchants, Credit Card Security, Point of Sale Tagged with: Breach, breaches, electronic payment, gateways, healthcare, medical, point of sale, POS, Security, transactions, transcription
