Comments on: Payments work fine, why are you bothering us? http://tomorrowstransactions.com/2012/04/payments-work-fine-why-are-you-bothering-us/ Thought leadership from Consult Hyperion Thu, 27 Feb 2014 22:21:56 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.1 By: Ketharaman Swaminathanhttp://tomorrowstransactions.com/2012/04/payments-work-fine-why-are-you-bothering-us/#comment-391 Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:22:10 +0000 http://ec2-54-201-142-57.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/2012/04/payments-work-fine-why-are-you-bothering-us/#comment-391 Banks offer accounts, some of your son’s friends won’t have them; Bank accounts offer cheque books, but your son won’t have them. Apple offers non-jailbroken iPhones, but your son won’t have them. At the risk of sounding facetious, is there a chance that your son and / or his friends won’t have banknotes unless they (say) carry their own photos in them? I’ve no doubt that some bright startup will come up with a new payment product to cater just to such kinds of target audiences. If somebody claimed that, where GenY population is sizable, such an audience is not small, I won’t argue. However, with the amount of fees your son and his friends might be willing to pay for such an innovative payment product, the question is how long that startup will survive. Even behemoths like Nokia Money have realized that, while innovation and consumer experience are important, they won’t pay the bills by themselves.

BTW, with a workaround or two, won’t Facebook Credits work for your son’s use case already?

With Square, there was so much friction in the status quo, as merchants who’ve tried to get an acquiring account from their banks know. Square dispensed with the need for merchants to get their own acquiring account. It also dispensed with the need for a merchant to buy / rent costly POS equipment. Whereas, unfortunately, I don’t see any parallel between Square and your son’s use case: People have been getting cheque books and genuine iPhones for ages and there’s no friction involved in the process. (BTW, Square doesn’t work on jailbroken iPhones either).

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