Visa and ROAM shined a light at what mobile means for payments at day one of Mobile World Congress last week, announcing a partnership that promises to bring mPayments to markets both developed and still developing across the world.
Market Platform Dynamics CEO Karen Webster spoke with Ken Paull, CEO of ROAM, and Matt Dill, global head of business development at Visa, to discuss the partnership, as well as how “bundling” payments platforms can be attractive to many merchants, and how mPayments is relevant to all demographics and parts of the world.
“Over the past 10 to 15 years, in particular, there’s been a real increase in what we call ‘consumer or merchant electronification,’” Dill said. “It started with the first wave of Internet and eCommerce, but has really gone into overdrive with the utility and availability of mobile phones and mobile handsets. This is a utility that has extreme value to merchants, it takes costs out of POS devices and it’s usable today. There are millions – 600 million Visa cards in the U.S. – and anytime a new reader is put out there, it just provides another place for payments to be electronified.”
And the expansion of this electronification of payments, as Dill deems it, is where ROAM comes into play. Paull noted that combining ROAM’s plat form with Visa’s reach and brand has the potential to make mPayments relevant in countless markets.
“I think it’s going to differ greatly by geography. Visa has such reach, obviously, around the world, and we’re very excited that they’re giving some structure and some recognition to what were doing as this technology takes off around the world,” Paull said. “In some places we’re still shipping Magstripe, in other places were getting into EM … so we’re providing some of the different bricks, and it’s really going to vary from country to country and region to region.”
“Most of the activity has been in the U.S. but as we start expanding into other geographies, as we’ve been doing over the past year, it really helps to have a program like Visa Ready to work with,” Paull explained.
Dill agreed with Paull, and gave additional examples of as to how mPayments are relevant not only today in the U.S., but will have significant staying power in different markets and demographics throughout the world.
“I think this is a technology that, again, is relevant today. And I say that because it’s as relevant for the farmer’s market or for a lawyer that’s been sending out invoices as it is in the emerging markets where they don’t have payments options at all. So we’re very comfortable looking at the utility of the device and the reader, and the combination of those aspects with services behind them, as being relevant today in the U.S. and having a long-term possibility for usage in almost every market that we operate in,” Dill explained.
To hear more from Webster, Dill and Paull on the Visa and ROAM agreement, how “bundling” payments platforms works, and more, listen to the full podcast below. And don’t forget to check out our February MPOS Tracker to see what other players are doing in the MPOS space.
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