Cardtek Talks The Future Of Mobile Payments

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the coming year and what their ideal payments system looks like.

Erdal Yazmaci, General Manager for Cardtek — an Istanbul-based payment technologies company that focuses on core payment and emerging technology solutions — spoke with us about what he’s seeing in the mobile payments space and how it will evolve.

PYMNTS: WHAT ARE THE BIG TRENDS YOU’RE SEEING IN PAYMENTS IN 2015?

EY: The big trend is mobile payment technologies. Mobile payment technologies are getting into different business sectors. Not only the retailers, but also the public transportation, or gas stations, running devices. Even through consumer domains. For example, connected TVs. The mobile payment and general payments business is getting into every rut in our life. … All these big players are getting into the payment business. This is really different because in the past the payment businesses were only managed by banks. But now, there are lots of giant companies like Apple getting into the payment business.

PYMNTS: WHAT ARE YOUR PREDICTIONS FOR PAYMENTS FOR NEXT YEAR?

EY: The mobile payments trends will continue to grow in 2016. It’s still at the very early phase at the moment. There are lots of announcements, lots of news. But still, the adoption rate is still not high, because there are some obstacles for mobile payments. The ID is very nice, but when you want to implement it, you have to manage lots of things at the same time. It’s not so easy (to integrate new systems).

In 2016, the companies like Apple, Google and others will push this technology more and more to go into our life. As there are lots of players pushing at the same time, I think they will achieve. Most of us will start using mobile payment technologies — not only for the payment in the retailers, but in more complex environments like public transportation, gas stations, etc.

PYMNTS: WHAT IS YOUR IDEAL PAYMENTS SYSTEM AND WHAT ARE SOME OF THE OBSTACLES FROM ACHIEVING THAT?

EY: The ideal system is … everything should be very simple, very integrated, very convenient and very secure. [Consumers] will have only a few wallet applications in [their] mobile phone, but not too many. At the moment, there are lots of different mobile wallets, so consumers don’t know which wallet to use in which business case. You need to be able to use your mobile wallets everywhere. Having the same user experience so you can perform the payments anywhere — even in your car or phone — you will be able to use these mobile devices.

There are lots of obstacles. One of them is the security parts, because the device isn’t recognized as being a very secure device. Lots of companies are trying to bring security to create a transit-execution environment in your mobile phone. That’s totally separated from other applications. This is still being done. In the security part, there are some standards. [Tokenization]. This is also very new. This brings the additional layer of security. … Through Visa and MasterCard, they’re starting to provide tokenization services, but it’s still needing integration into lots of other parts.