Ah, yes, it’s the most magical time of the year.
Predicting what the next year holds for all of us in payments.
The internet is already filled with tons of predictions about who will do what, when in 2015. The hustle and bustle of shopping and decorating and planning and going to holiday parties has taken a back seat to placing bets on what the next big moves will be in payments in 2015. I’ve seen tons of wildly optimistic projections of mobile payments volume, pundits predicting the rise and fall of players in payments, and emphatic assertions that this will be the year that mobile payments takes off.
For something like the tenth year in a row.
And, sort of like mistletoe and the trigger to kiss whoever is under it, this time of the year also seems to trigger that irresistible urge to commit numbers to the projections of the mobile volume that will, in fact, tip mobile payments volume for sure that next year.
Here’s what I mean.
In 2001, analysts predicted that mobile payments volume in 2008 would be $37B. Keep in mind that 2001 was 6 years after the Amazon launched on the web, 1 year before RIM launched the Blackberry and 6 years before we were introduced to the iPhone.
In 2009, those analysts said that mobile volume in 2012 would be $10B (notice the $27B decrease). That was 2 years after the iPhone and its app store was introduced and when smartphone penetration worldwide was less than 5 percent.
Undaunted, analysts in 2012 said that mobile volume a year later, in 2013, would rise to $2B (or based on their prior forecasts maybe they should have said, would decline from $10B) only to cut that estimate in half six months later.
So if you’re keeping tally, over the last 13 years, when it comes to predictions of mobile payments volume, it has been a case of the incredible shrinking predictions. The only real accurate data point that we can all point to is that over the last 13 years, retailers have clearly sold a whole heck of a lot more leather wallets than they’ve processed mobile wallet transactions – both in their stores or online.
Short of Santa Claus bringing analysts a pretty high tech crystal ball, the reality is that no one knows with any certainty what mobile payments volume will be worldwide or how quickly it will grow or when it will ignite. We’ll keep track of the forecasts though here, on the PYMNTS Mobile Transaction Ticker, so you have one place to go to find out who’s saying what on that score over the next year.
So, if we don’t know how the numbers will shake out, what do we really know about what lies ahead in 2015?
A few things.
We know, for instance, that directionally, eCommerce is up worldwide by about 20 percent, thanks to the diffusion of smart phones and the ability for those phones to connect more people to the internet.
We know that North America and China will account for roughly 90 percent of that volume. We also know that in Europe and the US, 70 percent of consumers will use their phones and tablets to make purchases online, and more than 50 percent of the people in Asia Pac will too – it was announced just last week that more than 54 percent of Alibaba’s volume is done with phone via mobile devices.
We also know that growth rates in eCommerce are starting to slow as these markets mature. And that the lines between “e” and “m” commerce are blurring as more consumers all over the world just move seamlessly between the devices they have that are connected to the internet and that enable them to conduct commerce on any one of them, anywhere, including in physical stores. I predict that we’ll soon see eCommerce and mCommerce renamed something like dCommerce – digital commerce – to account for the fact that commerce via devices connected to the internet can happen anywhere, including in store and the e and m distinctions are no longer relevant.
And, I will also go out on a limb here and safely say that in spite of how much we all want mobile commerce to happen, that in 2015 here in the US as well as in the developed economies around the world, virtually all consumers will continue to use their plastic cards virtually all of the time to pay for things in retail stores, which is, of course, where most commerce still happens.
That’s because, in spite of Tim Cook’s mockery of the leather wallet during the Apple Pay launch, payment in stores using plastic cards isn’t broken.
There’s been no compelling value proposition for either merchants or consumers to change that habit
And merchants, presented with too many things from too many ventures with money and access to the cloud and apps, suffer from the classic paradox of choice. At the same time they’re now trying to figure out how to deal with the implementation of EMV, they’ve put their mobile payments plans a bit on the back burner, waiting for the dust to clear and a direction to emerge.
Perhaps the big question is not whether 2015 is when mobile payments ignites – it won’t be – but whether it will be the year that a mobile payments direction emerges – here and around the world?
Maybe.
There were ten things that happened in 2014 that I do believe will change the course of mobile payments and commerce over the next ten years. None of these things are significant individually to tip a direction one way or the other next year. But, they clearly have and will shape the strategies and roadmaps of the players with the ambition to influence how mobile commerce, worldwide, evolves, over the next decade.
Here they are:
In my opinion, the Target breach was the Black Swan that swam into the payments ecosystem, totally shifting the priorities and focus of everyone in it.
Okay, so technically, that Black Swan swam in late December 2013, but we started life in payments in 2014 not with a focus on how merchants would use mobile to reinvent the relationships with their consumers and drive incremental revenue, but on how innovative cybercriminals had successfully compromised the security of cardholder data at the physical POS in a very material way and what we were going to do about it.
Target became the poster child and the now ex-Target CEO became a one-man spokesperson for advocating that EMV become a big part of what the industry was going to do about it, even though everyone acknowledged then and now that EMV would have done absolutely nothing to prevent the breach. But, understandably, no large merchant wanted to take the risk of not embracing a standard that was held out as a safe way for consumers to transact at the physical point of sale, and was used everywhere else in the world. That point became particularly compelling after merchants observed that consumers didn’t stop using their cards after the breach, they just stopped using them at merchants that had been impacted, Target in particular.
The theft of 70 million records, 40 million cards (debit and credit) contributed to a 46 percentage drop in Target profits in Q4 2013 over the year prior and cost the entire payments ecosystem close to a billion dollars in covering the cost of fraud, reissuing cards, etc. Target alone estimated that it would spend $100M to upgrade its terminals and that could be just the beginning. A Minnesota judge recently allowed banks to continue with their lawsuit against Target to recover the costs they forked over, based on the losses they incurred as a result of that breach.
Of course, the Target breach was followed by more than two dozen other retailer breaches in 2014, further diverting attention away from advancing mobile payments initiatives, and towards something else. That something else was EMV. 2014 was about changing the focus of merchants and issuers to protecting cardholder data at the physical point of sale. 2015 will be about finishing that process and then moving on to the next big hurdle, securing it online.
Until the Target breach, everyone admits, maybe nervously, that EMV in the US was not at all a certainty. In fact, aside from large merchants who had gotten the benefit of EMV capabilities in the terminals that they had purchased as part of their regular refresh cycle, there was no mad rush to embrace it. Fraud levels, particularly with PIN Debit, were manageable, and the focus and energy on the part of merchants was to cracking the code on using the mobile devices that their consumers always had with them to drive a better consumer/merchant experience and more incremental revenue their way.
As I mentioned, the Target breach and the ones that followed reprioritized that list. There’s been a massive rush on the part of merchants to deploy EMV and to do it in a timeframe that’s consistent with the October 2015 liability shift date.
Many believe that the 2014 merchant stampede to EMV tips an advantage to NFC and mobile wallet schemes that leverage NFC technologies in 2015 and beyond. On that point, I think that the jury’s still out.
Even the most aggressive estimates of deployment suggest that it will take 5 years for 85 percent of the merchants in the US to be EMV-enabled, and that by the end of next year, only 25 percent of all terminals will be. And, since in those numbers are Walmart’s millions of terminals, to which NFC-enabled schemes is like garlic to vampires, the notion that “most” merchants that matter will have NFC soon may be more wishful thinking than a foregone reality.
What EMV has done, and I’ll get to this later, is create energy around a way to secure cardholder transactions using tokens and a new network-centric tokenization scheme. The EMV technology and cryptography is the foundation of that framework. Whether it becomes the foundation for enabling NFC mobile wallet schemes remains to be seen and will depend on a few other developments that started life in 2014.
Looking back, 2013 was a pretty boring year for payments. Maybe it was the year that many players were hunkered down working on Apple Pay and positioning themselves for breakout moves under the cloak of Apple’s iron clad NDAs. But 2014 saw a lot of interesting public moves on the part of key players, perhaps signaling shades of things to come next year and beyond.
Chase’s 2013 deal with Visa that allowed it to license a private version of VisaNet’s transaction processing network took effect in early 2014. Chase is now able to create direct links between card issuers and merchants thru its newly formed Chase Merchant Services entity. JPMC has always controlled the consumer (cards) and merchant services (processing via Paymentech) but now has the ability to do all sorts of cool things, including creating a new three party network a la Amex if it wanted to. You can read my interview with Chase Merchant Services head earlier this year, Mike Passilla, and draw your own conclusions.
On the acquiring side, Vantiv acquired Mercury and introduced a whole new positioning around acquirers as integrated payments solutions providers. Not only does this move typify what’s likely to be an ongoing theme in 2015 – consolidation – but a deliberate move away from acquirers as suppliers of commodity services to a single source that can deliver a variety of services that help large and small merchants run their businesses better.
First Data is similar example but with a twist. Its three acquisitions this year (all totaled, they say were sub-$100M – Clovr, Perka, and Gyft) also signal a move to position First Data as a software company that delivers bundled hardware, software and apps to merchants looking for a single source to help them run their businesses. Key to this bundle is data, and a dashboard that gives merchants visibility into the things that can increase sales (e.g. where sales are coming from – or not) and then a toolkit that helps them execute on those deficiencies – offers, integrated gift card capabilities, improved social scores, etc. Its recent partnership with BlueSnap is designed to enable its merchants to move more efficiently into the world of cross-border commerce. Certainly, in addition to delivering better services to its 6 million merchant partners, all of this is in anticipation of an IPO at some point in the not too distant future.
We’ve also seen traditional terminal players reposition and pivot too, as they both ride the wave of terminal upgrades thanks to the EMV movement in the US, and mitigate the downside of being closed platform hardware companies in an era of open platforms and internet connected devices. Ingenico, for example, upped its ownership stake in mPOS leader ROAM, acquired Ogone to expand its reach beyond physical store transacting to online and acquired Global Collect to expand further into cross border transacting.
2013 was the year that Apple introduced the world to iBeacons and the notion of a cheap and efficient way to establish a two-way dialogue with a consumer holding a device running its operating system. As only Apple can do, that inspired an ecosystem of innovators who saw the potential in creating apps that could help those who wanted to leverage that capability to do so. Beacons – for both the Apple and Android ecosystems – took off given their ease of use, low cost and lack of chicken and egg issues to overcome. Consumers with phones could leverage the power of Beacons by downloading an app by a merchant that wanted to communicate with them.
In 2014, we’ve seen more than 30k instances of Beacons find their way into malls, stores, airports, and stadiums and plenty of companies specifically devoted to harnessing the power of Beacons emerge. In the payments and commerce world, Beacons help merchants identify customers as they enter their stores and can link that customer to a variety of data that makes the shopping experience a better one while they’re there. That’s pretty important since merchants want desperately to make the in store experience better to keep shoppers there once they enter. Beacon-enabled apps can call up the items shoppers have purchased when they were last there, promote sales or recommendations based on purchase history, remind customers to use gift cards or offers and even tee up payment information before they check out.
Now, the bad news here, aside from the fact that 30k of anything in payments is a rounding error, is that consumers haven’t exactly fallen in love with Beacons. That’s in part, because not all merchants have figured out how to use them well. But, it’s still early days, and 2015 will certainly see many a mash up between Beacons and merchants and payments and commerce as merchants look to drive better experiences in stores, capture more data about what consumers do when they are in those stores, and even embed payments into apps that are “Beaconized.”
The payments shot heard round the world on September 9th was Apple’s announcement of Apple Pay. As we reported then, it changed the conversation about payments and mobile in a way that no one had ever been able to do. It also galvanized a digital version of the existing four party payments model by working with issuers and 3 of the 4 payments networks.
Apple Pay suddenly made it okay for someone – Apple – to be in the middle of the relationship between consumers and their issuer and/or favorite merchant, for it to be okay for issuers to pay a spiff to a wallet provider on all transactions driven from it and for issuer’s brands to be, by and large, invisible. (After all, it’s called Apple Pay, not XYZ Issuer Pay powered by Apple.) It has also revived the feasibility of NFC at the physical point of sale and been the rising tide that has lifted all other payments schemes NFC boats, including Google Wallet, which claims a lift in transactions since Apple Pay launched.
The one thing that Apple Pay didn’t do was reinvent the payments experience. It, like all other NFC schemes, is about tapping and not swiping at the point of sale.
And that’s making it tougher than anyone had ever conceived in September for Apple Pay to get consumer traction. Some have been critical of our commentary on the reality of Apple Pay’s numbers this early into the game, but it is surprising that so few of those who can use it, do and so many who could use it haven’t even tried
In 2014, Apple and Apple Pay put everyone on notice that it’s in the payments game. It and its big network and issuer base of support make it a serious contender in the mobile payments space. What we’re likely to see in 2015 is how Apple and Apple Pay chose, or not, to proactively overcome the very significant chicken and egg problem they currently have at the physical point of sale and how their decisions about that influence how challengers and complementer both adjust.
Perhaps one of those two emerging battlegrounds worth watching in 2015 is in app and online where there’s actual friction to overcome when shopping and where Apple Pay has one horse in the race (in app) and one waiting to be saddled up (online). It will also be worth watching how Apple Pay plays internationally, including in China with Alipay. While NFC availability in regions such as the UK bode well for one aspect of the Apple Pay/iPhone 6 formula, its current economic model (percent of interchange which is bubkus and going to less than bubkus) does not.
I remember driving to the office early the morning of October 1st and hearing the Bloomberg Radio anchor say that eBay had suspended trading that day on the announcement that it and PayPal would be splitting, that PayPal would IPO in 2015 and that ex-Amex Enterprise Payments chief, Dan Schulman, would be taking over as President of PayPal and its new CEO when it became a separately traded company. I didn’t drive off the road, but I did slow down.
I also remember thinking that it was the first really major post-Apple Pay announcement. Clearly, these discussions had been in the making for more than the three weeks between Apple Pay’s launch and the announcement of the split, but it sure pointed to decisions at least partly informed by the direction that Apple was taking with payments.
It was also quite the strong contrast with what had been said not nine months earlier by John Donahoe – payments and commerce belonged together like peanut butter and jelly and eBay and PayPal were simply better together.
All that said, , the move will obviously inform lots of new things in 2015 for them and the players in the payments and commerce ecosystems. The move is largely perceived as a positive for both parties. eBay and PayPal will each be free to pursue partnerships that were off limits, or certainly difficult to imagine, before being two separate and independent companies.
It also puts both eBay and PayPal in play.
The split gives eBay new opportunities to enable other third party wallets as payments options in its marketplace, like Alipay. And that will require PayPal to work harder to keep intact the 33 percent of their revenue stream that comes from eBay.
For PayPal, the entity that drives 40 percent of eBay’s volume but that now has 75 percent of its transactions off eBay, its focus will need to be on expanding the number of wallets that it’s already populated (157M worldwide), more places for people to use it and more and more reasons for those with wallets to use them for more and more of their transacting.
For PayPal, not being part of a merchant (and therefore not in any way a competitor) may be the best thing to happen to its pitch to merchants to accept it as a payments method. But how it leverages its broad and expanding reach of payments and financial services capabilities – transactional credit, risk management, merchant cash advances, P2P, and cross border – is what everyone will be watching for in 2015.
And whether it actually IPOs or is acquired before then by something with a pretty fat bank account.
In between Apple Pay and the eBay PayPal split was the Alibaba IPO – the biggest in tech history.
Since raising $25B on the date of its IPO (September 18), Alibaba has seen its market cap increase by $80B. With a market cap of $259B today, Alibaba is larger than eBay ($60B) and Amazon ($140B) combined but also Walmart ($239B). And, according to Fortune magazine, it’s more valuable than all but eight companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
All of this has not only made Jack Ma Asia’s richest man, it’s added a whole new level of stress to Ma, which he told CNBC, makes him jump like a monkey, a bad thing, he says for the people around him.
And certainly more than a few global competitors.
Alibaba is a huge Chinese player that dominates commerce in China, as we all know well. Its Single Day sales this year nearly reached $10B and sales in China are increasing.
But Alibaba has its sights set on not being big in China but in being big on the global stage. And, it’s moving deliberately in that direction. It has translated its site into Portuguese in order to attract business in Brazil, beating out eBay in that market. It’s also embedding its supplier network into Bigcommerce.com’s platform allowing small and medium sized merchants to access a network of global manufacturers as sources for their own businesses. It’s done deals with Stripe to more easily enable Alipay integration into non-Chinese web sites and made investments in other commerce sites in the US such as 1st Dibs and 11Main to expand its network of marketplaces globally.
But that’s not the real story or the real implication for payments and commerce.
Alibaba isn’t a company, it’s an ecosystem, one that offers the Chinese consumer services and capabilities that touch every aspect of their lives, by design. Alibaba enables commerce online via its marketplaces, payments on and offline via Alipay, bill payment via Alipay, logistics and delivery services, investments, insurance, messaging, social media and access to content thru a variety of entities that it either owns or has made strategic investments in. It’s also an ecosystem that post-IPO, has lots more money to make lots more investments in order to expand its reach globally.
One of Alibaba’s most valuable assets is Alipay, part of a separate company of which Jack Ma also owns nearly half (a company that Jack Ma said last month would probably IPO). Alipay is, of course, an attractive asset for many reasons starting with the fact that something like 800M Chinese consumers have one of its digital accounts, and more than 300M of them use it via their mobile devices. It’s also valuable because it’s the gateway to dong business online with the emerging middle class and totally acquisitive Chinese consumer.
It’s also how Alibaba can expand globally without really planting an Alibaba flag anywhere.
Take ShopRunner, for example. Alibaba invested $200M+ into ShopRunner which, among other things, now accepts Alipay, thereby enabling those hundreds of millions of consumers to buy authentic American merchandise from American merchants using their payment method of choice. And, those hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will only continue to grow in numbers as more and more Chinese come on line. Less than half of the Chinese population has access to the internet today.
So, if 2014 was the year that Alibaba added lots of money to its coffers to make investments that give it the global heft that it seeks, 2015 will be the year that we’ll start to see how it plans to put that money to work.
The other A-named player that has its sights set on building and dominating a global commerce ecosystem is Amazon. And 2014 was the year that we got to see inside some of what it’s thinking.
Like how it’s okay to fail and spend billions doing it.
Amazon’s chief, Jeff Bezos, said last month that he’s “made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com.” Contributing at least a couple of hundred million to those billions was the launch of the Amazon Fire phone. Launched in the summer of 2014, it didn’t take long for the Fire phone to become ice cold as its lack of apps, a compelling value proposition for consumers and any merchant other than Amazon and an iPhone-like price tag found it taking up space on shelves in Amazon’s warehouse rather than in the pockets and pocketbooks of consumers – even when it dropped its price to a dollar.
In 2014, the original eTailer also announced that it was going brick and mortar in NY and rented an entire building in midtown to scratch that itch. It also hinted that it might enter the online travel market in early 2015, launched a variety of efforts to move grocery buying online (including the Dash device designed to make that easy), launched Amazon Local in an effort to bring plumbers, electricians and Angie’s list type services together with Amazon cardholders, launched online ordering and delivery a la Seamless and GrubHub, doubled down on delivery by ditching drones for bikes and a one-hour delivery schedule for a trial in NYC, launched its own branded consumer products to compete with its sellers online and seen retailers wise-up by lowering their prices to beat Amazon’s this holiday season.
2014 was also the year that analysts soured on the “its-okay-to-make-billions-and-lose-even-more-billions” philosophy that has defined Amazon since its inception and for which Amazon got a hall pass every earnings call. It is about time, analysts say, for Amazon to demonstrate that it has the skills to deliver a margin rather than to spend massively on things that don’t.
Amazon’s greatest assets are its 220M consumers who use it and use it often. They’ve changed the shopping experience for consumers and online and brick and mortar retailers have all felt the pinch. Amazon is where a lot of consumer shopping starts now. And Amazon has managed to crack the usage habit and parlay that into an advantage that has worked well for them online by making it easy to buy among the millions of products that are available on their marketplace.
In 2015, we’ll see how well Amazon does in expanding that experience offline. Amazon has the potential to disrupt local commerce in the sectors where it’s not perceived as competitive – at least not yet – services and food. But how far beyond that it goes will be decided by how much it plans to compete with the merchants who are today part of its online marketplace. We’ve already seen the big merchants beat Amazon at its own game – price discounting – this holiday season. Whether that’s a holiday shopping exception or the commerce rule going forward, remains to be seen.
So here’s one for you.
Name an innovation that’s been around for 6 years, has seen its usage over that time flatline in the last two years, has had its primary use case be payment for illegal activities like buying drugs and putting hits out on people, seen members of its distribution network include players who steal money and launder what they don’t steal, have 2 of the 5 leaders of its governing body convicted for criminal behavior, elect a new board member involved in allegations of child molestation, yet have VCs pour $350M into the innovators that want to further it, have conferences all around the world organized to talk about how to innovate on top of it and have bankers talk seriously about its use as an alternative to the existing way that money is moved around the world.
In 2014, as a currency, it’s been a total bust. Its value has been between 15 and 70 times as volatile as the Euro and it’s lost more than 70 percent of its value. The notion that a global currency that makes the Argentine peso look stable will be accepted by consumers and businesses as an alternative money supply is not only implausible, it’s as naïve as thinking as any central bank would advocate for a global money supply that removes their ability to control the economies of their own countries.
Bitcoin as a currency is a non-starter.
Bitcoin as an alternative set of rails is too.
The big topic of conversation in 2014 was away from bitcoin the currency towards bitcoin the protocol, as a productive way to move money around the world, cheaply and efficiently via its transparent – and advocates say –distributed ledger. But what we’ve observed in 2014 is the instability of the exchanges that are the critical nodes along that path. Perhaps the most productive and enlightening lesson of bitcoin and its protocol in 2014 is the insight into risks of shifting the movement of money to an unregulated network of random exchange operators who operate out of their basements and living rooms in countries we can’t pronounce as the future of money.
Thinking that it’s okay for the way we move money around the world is to replicate a system like the http internet protocol sounds interesting, innovative and enlightened.
It’s also just ridiculous.
In 2014, the most productive thing that bitcoin has done for the world of global money movement is to get everyone focused on how to improve the current method of doing that, using our regulations and existing actors and systems to do it. So, let’s hope that 2015 is the year that all of the talk about bitcoin and global currency and alternatives to regulated rails fades to the background and the conversation shifts to making what have work more efficiently.
Apple Pay may be moving more slowly than expected at changing the way that consumers transact at the physical point of sale, but the tokenization framework that is its security backbone is perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the scheme – and to payments – to emerge in 2014. For sure, it has, cemented the importance of bringing security, identity and commerce together as the future of transacting in any channel.
Now, of course, tokenization, as a way to secure transactions, is nothing new. Mobile schemes have been using it to turn account information into unusable bits of data for some time now. But the scheme that the networks have devised to enable Apple Pay is one that they hope will become the standard in how commerce is conducted along with a new steam of revenue for them as token vault operators.
First, it tokenizes the consumer’s personal account number (PAN) and turns it into a Device Account Number that’s stored today in a secure element on a consumer’s device. All consumer devices have a different device account number which enables devices to be turned on and off relatively easily in the event of theft (turned off) or acquisition (turned on). What’s more, it is intended to simplify and even accelerate the notion of commerce via the internet of things since it makes it easy for account credentials to be kept secure on any device that’s connected to the internet.
But this framework doesn’t stop there.
An encrypted one-time account number is generated and tokenized when transactions happen. This two-step process further disassociates personal account numbers (PANs) from transactions – making it even harder for bad guys to intercept information that can be used for fraud. The theory here is that one time tokenized account credentials + tokenized device account numbers not linked to real account numbers = too much work for not a lot of ROI if you make your living stealing cardholder credentials.
Now, we are still early days and the devil seems to be in those token details. What we’ll need to see in 2015 is how the networks plan to address all of the little things that matter for commerce to ignite and scale. Like helping retailers map loyalty programs to customers using devices that mask PANs (which is how loyalty accounts are typically configured), and streamlining refunds. And, adapting this to a range of technologies (not just NFC) and channels (not just physical retail and NFC or in app using an iPhone 6). It’s in their interest – and that of their stakeholders and shareholders – to be sure that this solution works well beyond Apple Pay since Apple Pay is but a tiny and very tiny piece of the payments pie right now and Apple users aren’t the only people who might want to use mobile devices for payment.
So, this is my take on the ten things that I think drove the direction of payments and commerce in 2014 and will influence what will happen in the year that we’re about to enter. And, unlike 2013, I do think that 2015 will be exciting year, filled with visible moves and shifts. I also thinkwhat happens in 2015 and over the next three years, will in fact, define how the rest of the decade plays out, one way or the other.
Next week, I’ll share how I think that all of this impacts the players that represent the ecosystem we call payments and commerce.
So, stay tuned!