Mobile’s 10X Potential

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For mobile payments to adopt, it has to provide not only a great consumer experience, but one that is 10x better. That’s the view of Nick Nayfack, Director of Product: Mobile at Vantiv, who told MPD CEO Karen Webster how he thinks mobile will get there – and why it’s got a pretty long way to go.

Merchants have to consider consumer satisfaction as well as the optimization of their business experience in deciding whether to make mobile more than just an idea to toy with. In the October installment of PYMNTS’ Omnicommerce Tracker, powered by Vantiv, the growing expectation for increased mobile enablement rang true, but what will it take for merchants, and the payments industry as a whole, to answer the call?

“Mobile faces the same challenge that any new technology faces — that is how to make and provide an experience that is at least 10 times better than using other forms of payment,” Nayfack explained.

This concept of increasing the value-added experience tenfold stands between truly igniting the adoption of mobile payments in the omnicommerce world, or simply adding kindling to the pile.

Making mobile thrive for both merchants and consumers will take more than just swapping out a mobile device for a card or cash at the point of sale.

Nayfack said the adoption of mobile relies on two critical factors: both sides of the transaction having the experience of saving time and money, as well as both merchants and consumers seeing an exponential increase in value and convenience.

[bctt tweet=”Accelerating mobile payments will take more than just swapping out a card for a phone at the POS”]

For now, the perception of mobile payments versus the reality of mobile payments varies drastically, but what does that mean for the future?

According to Nayfack, “there is no future, there’s just a different shade of the past.”

“The future of payments really is going to be machine-to-machine and to even call it mobile is going to be sort of obtuse. The device itself will eventually go away and there will be machine-to-machine communication enabling more of an invisible payment,” he explained.

Looking back hundreds of years ago, payments were facilitated by the ability to establish personalized preferences with the merchants consumers came into contact with. Nayfack drew on the example of rolling into a small town in the Old West and a shopkeeper knowing you and what you purchased, but in the future he expects this to be replaced by anonymized personalization tokens.

“Fundamental change is when you don’t have to get your phone out, that is when mobile will really shine. You really will just have a human engagement and much greater simplified experience in payments,” Nayfack said.

According to Nayfack, a surge in the rate of mobile adoption among merchants will require this type of fundamental shift to make the offer more compelling.

Leveraging the opportunity to make mobile 10 times more valuable to merchants is an initiative that may take the work of the entire payments ecosystem – presenting a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma for industry players.

[bctt tweet=”A fundamental shift in behavior is needed to surge mobile payment adoption”]

“If we want to see digital transactions really thrive it’s going to require many of the actors and stakeholders in this ecosystem to agree on what that vision looks like and then come together to make best practices so we can get on that path,” Nayfack stated.

“That’s going to be our fundamental challenge – coming together as an industry to realize such invisible payments, creating a vision collectively and building the infrastructure pieces to get there.”

When it comes to embracing innovation in payments, Vantiv continues to advise merchants to support the initiatives that will bring the greatest value and have a clear understanding of which technologies make the most sense to adopt for their business segment.

“It’s a matter of education and providing positive, reliable experiences at this point, while also doing our part to help guide the industry on the mobile side and connect it better with the merchants side,” Nayfack said.

To download the October Omnicommerce Tracker, click here.

For more updates from Vantiv, click here.