When I was an elementary school-aged kid, I looked forward to coming home from school and grabbing an ice cold Coca-Cola and a snack before venturing out into the neighborhood to play. And while I can't remember the exact discussions I had with friends around the lunch table when I was that age, I do remember our anticipation of the launch of New Coke in 1985. And oh my, how much my friends and I were disappointed when our lips first met New Coke. My reaction, with most others, was that we wanted our "old" Coke back.
Fast forward nearly 30 years and now my lunch discussions often revolve around payments. Each day I am reminded of my New Coke experience via an e-mail or news article touting or predicting an explosion in mobile payments. I'll admit it—I'm getting mobile payments fatigue. The payments industry has been anticipating mobile payments for years now, yet I find the developments to date mostly disappointing. Sure, I've made plenty of payments using a mobile device to purchase digital goods or even to purchase physical goods in an online marketplace. But outside of a few experiences of purchasing coffee with a closed-loop solution, my mobile device stays in my pocket when I'm making a purchase at the point-of-sale (POS) as I take out my reliable cards or cash.
And that is where my New Coke analogy comes into play. To many people, nothing was wrong with Coca-Cola, yet the coolness of a new product created a great level of expectation—which turned to immense disappointment. At the POS, payments are relatively seamless, yet the newness of mobile payments creates great anticipation, only to end up being disappointing and leaving me thinking, "What's wrong with my current payment choices?"
So much attention on mobile is focused on replacing a current payment form at the POS—perhaps the most seamless piece of the commerce experience. Often in mobile payment discussions, I hear that mobile payments are a technology solution looking for a problem rather than trying to solve a problem. However, I think the industry is looking in the wrong place as the problem isn't with the payment. It's with the overall experience in and around the POS. I believe mobile devices have the ability to transform this experience, but it's not by replacing my cards or cash as a payment method. It's by replacing the entire commerce experience. Are you experiencing mobile payment fatigue? And if so, what will it take to energize you?
By Douglas A. King, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed