Reaching Toward Critical Mass in Payments

http://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Matchmaker-4.m4a

The concept of matchmaking is an old one. Think love, worship, the ancient symbols of yin and yang. Each part has a counterpart. So it is with payments, where buyers and sellers link to transact in a perfect world, with a one-to-one relationship. The advent of technology is a movement to try to make the transaction, ideally, a frictionless one.
But how can technology work to bring new merchants to new buyers, without lopsided development or imbalances on either side of the scale? That in part was the focus of discussion between MPD’s Karen Webster, Richard Schmalensee, co-author of the book “Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms,” and Nick Kerigan, managing director of Future Payments at BarclayCard, in the latest installment of PYMNTS’ weekly series, The Matchmaker is In.
“We like to think of platforms as something interactive and enabled by the mobile age,” said Kerigan, who noted that matching buyers and sellers is a process that traces back to the Ancient Greeks, and card payment networks stretch back across several decades, with one milestone having been passed as Barclays itself marks the 50th anniversary of debuting its credit cards in the United Kingdom.
But, noted the executive, when it comes to payments, innovation “is an art as much as science in terms of what is likely to succeed,” where bringing supply and demand together can be a dicey proposition – and where it is important to identify the friction points that exist for consumers and suppliers that can be alleviated through technology, enough so that it can in effect change consumer behavior.

The discussion took a turn toward a concrete example in the form of video game consoles, as posited by Schmalensee, where the question remains as to how new games can support new consoles and new consoles can spurt the continuous development of new games.  The trick? Pricing the console low enough so that there is what is tantamount to a “public promise” that pricing will be low enough to spur adoption by consumers (and developers), while at the same time lending credibility to the game makers that developing and marketing new offerings will be worth the time and effort.
“When I think about the learnings we’ve had in contactless in the U.K. since 2007, you’re trying to get critical mass on each side, and there’s really kind of subtle learnings that you get through experience,” where insights come into play delving into consumer behavior, said Kerigan, and then it becomes apparent the importance of other initiatives, such as training the staff within the actual merchants. “That’s not obvious when you are starting out in a major program,” continued Kerigan. “You learn some of the smaller prompts that actually become quite important,” he added, with true value realized upon moving toward critical mass. Of special importance is providing concrete use cases that demonstrate the value-add of technology as it comes aboard an enterprise.
Added Schmalensee, “There’s so many business models that would work brilliantly at scale, but getting them to scale, you often find new bumps and hurdles that you hadn’t anticipated … Being flexible enough to learn [is key],” he said.

[&amp;amp;lt;a href=”//storify.com/PYMNTs/matchmaker-series-nick-kerigan” target=”_blank”&amp;amp;gt;View the story “Matchmaker Series: Nick Kerigan” on Storify&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;]