Tag: smartphone transactions

Mobile payments system being built by Polish banks

| July 11, 2013

The financial institutions are hoping to work together so that smartphone transactions can take on credit card systems.

Six of the biggest banks in Poland have announced that they will be working together in order to create a common standard for mobile payments which would result in a system that could place the dominance of traditional credit card giants at risk.

They are hoping that this will knock the wind out of Visa and MasterCard that currently lead the way in the country.

The banks that are involved in this partnership include Bank Zachodni WBK, Bank Millennium, ING Bank Śląski, Alior Bank, PKO Bank Polsk, and BRE Bank. As a group, the banks working toward this mobile payments system make up 70 percent of the electronic banking market in Poland. They will be working to come up with the standard under the Polish regulator in this sector.

The mobile payments offering will be based on the IKO app from PKO Bank, which was just launched in March.

Mobile Payments - Bank Zachodni WBKThe mobile payments system will allow consumers in Poland to be able to complete purchase transactions while in stores, and will be able to make withdrawals from ATMs by entering a unique code that the app has generated. Consumers will also be able to use the app to send money to recipients simply by entering in their smartphone number in a way that has been compared to the UK’s Barklays Pingit service.

The use of this mobile payments system allows consumers to be able to make electronic transactions without the requirement of a credit card. This was a fact that Visa was “not happy about,” according to Wojciech Bolanowsky, from PKO.

At the same time, Boguslaw Kott, the CEO of Bank Millennium, has admitted quite openly that one of the purposes of the bank group in creating this mobile payments system is to challenge the rein of Visa and MasterCard. Kott was quoted to say that “This will be a more competitive system compared to the credit card system. The credit card system will probably be put under a question mark in the future.”

Mobile payments make up 10 percent of U.S. Starbucks transactions

| June 24, 2013

One in ten purchases made in the coffee shops across the United States are made using smartphones.

According to the coffeehouse chain’s own statistics, which have just been released, mobile payments are now accounting for over ten percent of all transactions that are made within its American stores.

The purchases are being made over Android, iPhone, BlackBerry devices in the United States.

The Starbucks Card Mobile App allows customers in the coffee stores to be able to pay for their coffees and treats through the use of their smartphones with mobile payments based on barcode scans at the checkout. The chief financial officer at Starbucks, who is also the chief accounting officer, Troy Alstead, explained that this method of paying for products is “a very sticky transaction by virtue of the fact that people have preloaded their money that we hold for them in anticipation of that coming transaction.”

Alstead explained that mobile payments also provide the opportunity to gain an understanding of their customers.

Starbucks Mobile PaymentsHe explained that by using mobile payments, it gives Starbucks “an ability for us to harvest that information and really determine the most effective ways over time to understand our customer to target products toward them and the appropriate ways to reach them with our messages.” He also noted that in total, the transactions made using the Starbucks Card – using both the mobile app and the actual plastic card – make up nearly a third of all of the purchases made in the United States.

Recently, the company said that the card is now making up approximately 4 million mobile payments transactions every week. This is twice the 2 million transactions that were occurring by the end of 2012 every week. Furthermore, the purchases made over the Starbucks Card Mobile App are now making up a much larger proportion of North American digital wallet transactions than their primary rivals, such as the high profile Isis and Google Wallet. This, according to data issued by Berg Insight earlier in June.

CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, has stated that the company will be boosting its m-commerce services throughout the year and that mobile payments are only expected to grow.