Mary Carol Harris joins Apple, bringing her extensive mobile payments experience with her
Apple has made an aggressive move in the mobile payments space. The company has successfully acquired Mary Carol Harris, the former director of mobile for Visa Europe. Harris has significant experience in the mobile space, especially when it comes to payments. She also has expertise with NFC technology, which is the foundation of the new Apple Pay service. Apple’s acquisition of Harris may go a long way in improving the company’s stance in the European mobile commerce market.
Apple is working to establish a strong foothold in the European market
Apple Pay intends to change the way that people pay for goods and services, leveraging contactless technology in order to make payments more convenient for consumers. The service is already being heavily supported by a wide variety of financial institutions, including Visa itself. In the U.S., Apple Pay has been met with excitement, but this is not the case in other parts of the world. In Europe, the demand for mobile commerce services has been quite high, but consumers have become quite comfortable with the services that they are currently using, which may make it difficult for Apple Pay to stand out amongst the competition.
Harris could be pivotal to Apple’s European goals
Mary Carol Harris has 14 years of experience in digital and mobile payments. Before joining Visa, she ran Telefonica’s NFC division. She served as Visa Europe’s vice president in charge of strategic alliances and projects in mobile thereafter. Harris has extensive experience in creating mobile payment systems and she was one of the pioneers of payments via SMS. She may serve as a powerful ally in Apple’s push into the European market.
Apple looks to partner with European financial organizations
Apple is hoping to form partnerships with European financial institutions that mirror its partnerships with organizations in the U.S. By partnering with European banks, Apple will be able to make its new mobile payments service more widely available. The Apple Pay service supports NFC technology, but only works with payments being made from an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus.
Denny |
September 30, 2014
These products will be available exclusively to customers who will access them over their smartphones and tablets.
As much as online bill paying and digital transaction processing have become exceptionally commonplace, mobile banking has been experiencing a relatively slow adoption, comparatively speaking.
Some tenants are now capable of paying their rents electronically to skip paper checks, but smartphones aren’t there yet.
That said, as companies behind mobile payments work very hard to encourage consumers to use their smartphones instead of credit or debit card, a rising number of options are becoming available. Many are hopeful that the recent release of Apple Pay, along with the NFC enabled iPhone 6 will help to convince consumers to use this type of technology. At the same time, Citibank is looking at a mobile banking option that provides an account that is exclusive to smartphones and tablets.
The mobile banking account is called Access and Citibank has made it exclusively for these device users.
The primary market for the Access accounts are the Millennial generation, which typically down even own a checkbook and that are very used to paying their bills and making purchases online. This generation is also very comfortable with completing a large range of different tasks through the use of their smartphones and tablets.
Millennials are actually the biggest age-based demographic that are compete non-users of paper checks. Overall, though, 32 percent of consumers still use a paper check to pay at least one bill, whereas slightly more – 38 percent – pay at least one bill electronically.
As a whole, 12 percent of all Americans have said that they do not use their checkbook – regardless of whether or not they ever had one. Many of those who do still use checks use them for only one or two bills every month. Among the most common uses for this type of transaction is to pay rent.
Citibank is now seeking to move this type of transaction in a new direction with mobile banking and is aiming this product at the demographic that is most likely to be open to adopting it. According to the Citi U.S. chief operating officer of retail banking, Robert Beck, “We developed Access after spending a lot of time listening to customers and looking at their banking needs, and we identified several trends.”
