“Cloudy” with a Chance of Mobile Payments: BayPay Forum Recap

On April 19 at the BayPay Forum on Mobile Payments in San Jose, the evening outside was calm, cool and quiet, with high clouds drifting across a full moon. But inside the Forum’s main hall, a quiet revolution was underway as clouds slowly drift across the face of NFC-enabled mobile commerce. Cloud-based payments and IP-enabled mobile devices – in the hands of consumers and retailers alike – are bringing a fundamental change to the way mobile payments will evolve beyond the historical proposition of NFC-based proximity payments at the point of sale. The focus of Tuesday’s panel was enabling payments through many other means beyond NFC – from direct-carrier billing to bar-code scanning to remote checkout – with a view on how the investments in non-NFC mobile payments could enable new business models beyond core payment. The next morning that perspective would be further validated by eBay’s announced acquisition of LBS mobile marketer “WHERE,” further extending the convergence of mobile remote payments and physical retail.

BayPay: As a forum and network of payments innovation professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area, the BayPay Forum sits at the epicenter of the tectonic shifts in the payments industry. Tuesday’s conference panel focused on the hot topic in payments innovation – mobile commerce – with a strong panel of power players in the mobile revolution. The panelists represented a compelling cross section of mobile innovators, including:

 

– Joe Lynam, Founder & CEO, PaymentOne

– Carole Realini, Executive Chairman, Obopay

– Andy Kleisch, CEO, Billing Revolution

– Yuri Drozd (ex-CTO of Cimbal), CEO, Motreus

– John Pizzi, COO, mFoundry

– Eric Barbier, CEO, TransferTo

 

The panelists discussed the evolution of remote mobile payments and alternative payments facilities, including direct-to-carrier and direct-to-DDA billing, as well as the mobile authentication and security. Talk also turned to the mobilization of current value propositions, with mFoundry’s recent success with the development and delivery of mobile-enabled prepaid loyalty for Starbuck’s a featured case study. Solutions that are optimized for the core function of mobile devices – namely remote and highly-mobile remote communication – continue to grow quickly into the value proposition spaces that NFC-enabled mobile payments have traditionally targeted. Consumer in-line self-checkout solutions are quickly morphing into consumer-driven in-aisle checkout applications hosted on smartphone devices.

As the NFC platform model continues to wait for handsets and reader adoption to grow and ignite a new payments ecosystem, the quiet cloud-based mobile payments revolution continues to change the world of retail payments. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the BayPay Forum continues to foster the debate and spur the innovation that drives the mobile revolution.