Category: Retail

[Dave Birch] Back looking at Japan again, but this time thinking about the non-bank entrants to the payment space, other than DoCoMo of course.  There was a detailed story in Card Technology covering the transit side of things.  Mobile Suica, the mobile version of the JR East Suica transit card, has got off to a slow start.  There are 19 million of the contactless transit cards in circulation but after its first year only 350,000 people signed up for the mobile version.  In addition to the mobile implementation, JR East have started to extend the e-purse usage to retailer, but there are only 10,000 POS locations in Tokyo where it can be used.  Not for long, though, because JR East, DoCoMo, JCB and bitWallet have announced that they have agreed to share a common platform so that all of the payment brands (Suica, iD, QUICPay and Edy) will work in the same POS.  There are currently about 100,000 contactless POS terminals in Japan.

Why the slow take up?  Akio Shiibashi, director of the Suica Systems Department at JR East is quoted saying that the registration process has been "difficult" for many prospective users.  Sounds like a common problem for "traditional" business moving into the mobile space: a generation accustomed to instant messaging and interactivity colliding with a multi-page application forms and postal services.

Technorati Tags: contactless, mobile, retail, transit

Continue reading “Japanese lessons”

[Dave Birch] I was surprised that the first item on the BBC news yesterday was again about card fraud (which they insist on calling chip & PIN fraud when it is only the PIN that is compromised).  The main part of the report was entirely about petrol stations — and even claimed, I think somewhat imaginatively — that motorists are starting to use cash instead of cards.  I wonder if the extent of the reporting of the fraud, if not the fraud itself, will genuinely cause a backlash against card use for fuel?  And if it does, will people really go back to cash or will they instead prefer to move to a biometric solution such as the PayByTouch system installed at the Stop ‘n Save gas and convenience stores in Colorado, some of the 2,000 U.S. retailers that use the technology.  Of these, Piggly Wiggly has the best name, in my opinion.

Technorati Tags: ATM, banking, biometrics, credit cards, debit cards, fraud, security

Continue reading “Back to biometrics”

[Dave Birch] In case anyone wants to pop in and say hello (or “you don’t know what you’re talking about” or something similar) I’ll be at the Internet Retailer show in London. I’m giving the keynote presentation in the Payments and Strategy track at 9am, talking about what’s happening in online payments and what’s likely to happen over the next couple years.

Technorati Tags: internet, retail

Continue reading “Internet retailer”