Happy Thanksgiving! Turkey Day is a time for friends, family, football, feasting on fall foods, and if you’re a member of the payments community, to give thanks for your favorite payments innovations.
Question: What payments innovation are you most thankful for this year?
Check out these answers from top payments experts and then feel free to add your own below:
René Lacerte, CEO & Founder, Bill.com
- We at Bill.com are most thankful that both the awareness about the market opportunity and the need for small businesses payment solutions has increased dramatically in 2010. That of course contributes to better tools and adoption rates for all, allowing small business owners and their staff to gain efficiencies, spend less time doing bill management, and more time chasing their dreams.
Bango
- We are thankful to the 4.6 billion mobile phone users worldwide who are creating the payment marketplace, which is vastly bigger than anything we have seen before. With nearly half of mobile phone users worldwide predicted to pay with their devices by 2014 (according to Juniper Research) the opportunity for businesses to capitalize on this is huge.
Deborah Baxley, Principal, Capgemini
- AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Discover and Barclays for making a BOLD MOVE that may create a tipping point for mobile payments in the US – strong industry leaders can change the industry for the better.
- The Smart Card Alliance’s unflagging support for chip enabled payments which offer the promise of a better future in which payments are secure and convenient.
Jan Manten, CEO of GlobalCollect
- “Despite the challenging economic climate, eCommerce figures continued to show a double-digit growth rate throughout 2010. With well over 200 million payment transactions, GlobalCollect mirrored this trend, and we’d like to thank all our merchants for their trust and continued business to make this possible.”
Margaret Weichert, Managing Director of Market Platform Dynamics
- “As I write this, I am sincerely grateful for integrated loyalty/payments cards, particularly my Starbucks card. Not only does my simple plastic prepaid card make checkout simple, it also gives me perks — free soy for my lattes!”
Karen Webster, President of PYMNTS.com
- “I’m thankful for the relatively low tech mag stripe. Thanks to it, I can use any type of card anywhere I like to shop — critically important as we enter the prime shopping season. Well, incredibily important any time, really, now that I think about it.”
David S. Evans, author of “Paying With Plastic”
- “I’ve been in France and the UK for the 10 days before Thanksgiving. I’m thankful that I can use the same plastic card to take money out of cash card machines and pay for things with the same piece of plastic I use around town in Boston. Sitting here in London and hearing people talk about the possible collapse of the Euro, it is good to know that we don’t have to depend on governments for every tender type”
Tim Attinger, former Global Head of Product Innovation and Development at Visa Inc.
- “I’m thankful for mobile offers and alerts that make my favorite card even more valuable, telling me when a retailer has value for me and thanking me for the purchase as I check out.”
