Starbucks created a lot of buzz about mobile payments when the company release it’s popular mobile payment app in 2011, and indeed Starbucks was on the vanguard of consumer retail mobile payments. And by most measures the Starbucks app should be considered a success. CEO Howard Schultz told investors during a recent earnings call: “Today in the U.S. alone over 13 million customers are actively using our mobile apps and we’re now averaging over 7 million mobile transactions in our stores each week, representing roughly 16% of total tender, more than any other bricks and mortar retailer in the marketplace.” That’s impressive.
But as Ralph Dangelmaier write in VentureBeat, “a world with one mobile payment app per company would be unfeasible and inconvenient for consumers, no matter how many Frappuccino’s they guzzle per week. Don’t believe for a second that Apple, Google, Samsung, PayPal, Alibaba and the other Wallet Warriors will tolerate a payment ecosystem in which every major company processes its own transactions.They all want a cut. Just look at the acquisitions in 2015. Samsung picked up LoopPay, the “most accepted mobile wallet on the planet.” PayPal snatched Paydiant, a white label platform for mobile payments, loyalty, offers and more. Google nabbed SoftCard (formerly and tragically “Isis”), an NFC mobile wallet that will be discontinued and integrated into Google Wallet.Welcome to Wallet Wars… As long as companies are dependent on the credit card ecosystem, they are doomed to lose roughly 2 percent of every transaction to the Visa-MasterCard-tel.”
Read more via VentureBeat.