2015: The year of the "university experiment" of the mobile payment

December 28, the U.S. Science and Technology blog website GigaOM Saturday, the mobile payment of the spring is coming, 2015 will be mobile payment of the "university Experiment" year.

In the 2015, businesses will offer consumers an unprecedented choice in terms of payment, and consumers will try it all with a positive attitude. Waving iPhone6 in front of NFC sensors to complete mobile payments is not an amusement. If your sister buys a bottle of beer for you using Apple Pay, she will be excited to tell the experience.

2015 will be an experimental year for mobile payments, and High-tech companies are trying to replace the traditional swipe-card system with new forms of payment. In the United States, these experiments will have a ripple effect and change the basis, rules and alliances of the payment industry.

From Beacon to mobile payment

Retailers are pinning their hopes on beacon technology, and 2015 will be the year when Beacon is widely used. Through the Internet connection, Bluetooth-enabled beacon devices, combined with mobile applications, enables retailers to position their customers indoors and provide customers with location-based merchandise information. Beacon can also collect and analyze customers ' store shopping information to achieve personalized product recommendations, as Amazon does now.

For example, if you are walking in front of the oral hygiene shelf, beacon can detect your location and send electronic toothbrush discounts to your phone. If you want to buy a prescription drug again, the Beacon device in the pharmacy will send you a reminder the minute you walk into the pharmacy. If retailers cleverly use beacon, they will be able to drive sales growth and pave the way for mobile payments. Starbucks has taken steps in this direction, and many retailers will follow.

New Payment Methods

Most iPhone6 shoppers will try Apple Pay, but the experiment will be more than that. PayPal, Google Wallet, Alipay, Coin, current C, and dozens of other mobile payment technologies will be tested (or tested again) in 2015. The US Stratos company is trying to develop a fully functional credit card. The company found that 30% of smartphone users in the United States are accustomed to using mobile phone payments to shop during holidays. Consumers do not necessarily feel the inconvenience of credit cards to adopt new payment methods, they may simply because they are "cool" or fashionable and ready to taste.

Non-card trading and card trading

Visa and MasterCard are the people who set up the rules for credit card payments. When consumers use credit cards online to shop, they need to pay higher fees. Now, since consumers are able to use online payments in their stores, the card-not a transaction costs are being challenged. "If the customer is in the dining room now, does he need to pay a higher transaction fee," said a customer who uses the online booking platform OpenTable.

With the blurring of the line between card trading and card trading, Visa and MasterCard must somehow resolve or eliminate the rate gap between them in 2015. Otherwise, they will face serious challenges from the Merchant customer transaction (Merchant customer EXCHANGE,MCE) alliance. MCE, led by Wal-Mart, is developing its own payment system CurrentC to counter Apple Pay, Visa and MasterCard. The CURRENTC system can save retailers billions of of dollars in transaction costs.

Social payments will find a way to profit

Both Twitter and Facebook are preparing to launch their own payment services, and they will find a way to make them profitable for the service in 2015. Initially, Twitter and Facebook Messenger will use Peer-to-peer networks to pay, but two companies must know that the real challenge is to service businesses. They can take a "social e-commerce" approach that allows people to do deals in their brand home pages, posts and tweets without having to lead people to external sites. Like Visa and MasterCard, Facebook and Twitter can charge a fee for each transaction. Social networking sites can shorten the time between consumers discovering products and buying products, so they may increase sales. This may eventually give the social network a chunk of the e-commerce cake.

Anything can happen in 2015. By the end of this year, we will see a more pronounced split between the pro-credit and credit-card camps, led by Visa and MasterCard, and the latter are trying to overturn the former's dominance in the payment industry. The current tension between Apple's payments (credit-card camp members) and CurrentC (the members of the anti-credit-card camp) is only a prelude to a future situation. Individual businesses, payment technology companies and social networks will all have to figure out where they are headed.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)