Mobile Payments and Banks: Looking Forward

Banks must figure out how and to what extent they want to play in the mobile payments game.

In the continually evolving mobile payments landscape, bank are at something of a crossroads. As new players emerge in the space seemingly by the week, banks are figuring out how they should get involved and to what extent.

According to Peter Olynick, Card & Payments Practice Lead for Carlisle & Gallagher, there are some banks who will be content to simply be the low cost provider of a back-end mobile payments transaction. "Some banks will say 'Whatever front end wallet wants to push transactions into my back end, I’m fine with that,'" he adds.

However, most banks will want to be more actively involved than that, and desire to have some level of ownership of the relationship "and will work hard to maintain that," he says.

Olynick says many of his firm's bank clients are actively interested in mobile payments, and concerned primarily in four areas. The first is security, and while consumer education plays a role in having more secure financial services, banks must do all they can to minimize the chances a criminal can hack into a customer's mobile payments app. This involved not only proper authentication to log into the app, but having protocols to detect possible fraud once a user is inside the app.

Speed is also a factor for banks to consider in mobile payments. "Consumers have gotten to the point where they can do what they want to do -- whatever it is -- with instantaneous results," he notes. Olynick says banks that roll out mobile payments services that work at speeds any less than this, will risk alienating customers.

He says further that any mobile payments service must work in an omnichannel environment. He says that while most -- if any -- banks have not gotten to a true omni-channel environment, when one does it will change the industry.

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Finally, Olynick notes that another area of mobile payments banks are looking at is for commercial customers. He says the corporate purchasing card or travel and expense card offer a different dynamic than consumer payments, and unique opportunities in a mobile environment.

While banks have long been concerned with their branded cards being top of wallet, that priority is shifting to being "top of phone" as mobile payments become more commonplace, he notes.

To hear more on the mobile payments landscape from Olynick and other experts please register for Bank Systems & Technology's live half-day mobility event.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio