Five-Year Forecast: The mPayments Landscape

How will the mobile payments and commerce landscape take shape over the next three-to-five years?

It’s a question many payments pundits and analysts refuse to answer, but one Carl Tsukahara, global head of marketing at Monitise, was happy to tackle head-on.

The mCommerce space is now a trillion-dollar space, with players from various different verticals and industries all fighting for a share of the rapidly growing mobile market. The advantages that mCommerce and mPayments offer are obvious. What’s less obvious is who’s best poised to take advantage of the trend, and what these entities need to do to ensure mobile supremacy.

PYMNTS.com spoke with Tsukahara to discuss these topics, and to learn what we can expect to see from mobile in the coming years.

“There are so many folks still engaged in commerce, there won’t be one winning industry. But we do believe with great conviction that the financial services entities, the banks and payments companies, will have a very, very strong, dominant role in this,” Tsukahara said.

But despite that bet, Tsukahara predicted that other entities, such as retailers, mobile network operators and entertainment companies, will all make pushes in the mobile industry too. And interestingly, Tsukahara says he thinks we’ll see some “standalone” companies take a closed loop approach to mobile payments as well.

Those entities will likely subside over time, though, as Tsukahara sees more “collaborative capabilities” coming to the mPayments forefront.

“Whoever ends up owning the consumer phone top and the mindshare of engagement, other folks who want to use this as a commerce channel will need to migrate to those points. And it’s really based on the premise that you have to go to where the eyeballs are,” he said. “It’s not the other way around where you have content that sucks in the eyeballs and creates a large entity.”

So which companies will be the ones who own that “mindshare of engagement?” According to Tsukahara, it’s those entities that understand that the real consumer value in mPayments comes from the features that surround transactions, and not the physical payment itself.

“There’s a big misnomer that some people think about the mobile wallet, and they associate it by monetizing the payment, and that’s not correct. You really want to monetize everything around the experience,” Tsukahara said. “Those could be things such as creating loyalty. If you’re a retailer or a financial institution, you want to have loyalty. You want your consumers to look at this as really the extension of your brick-and-mortar in building a relationship. You want to make sure that you’re driving the monetization not necessarily around, ‘I can wave the phone at a terminal in store.’ It’s more what you can do when you have those vehicles and have the consumers.”

To hear more from Tsukahara on the mobile payments landscape and the players that will shape it in the coming years, listen to the full podcast below.

   

*If you have trouble with the audio player above, click here.