First Data

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http://www.firstdata.com/en_us/about-first-data/media/press-releases/03_11_10_02

http://www.firstdata.com/en_us/about-first-data/media/press-releases/03_11_10

Michael Capellas is gone on the day that earnings are announced. 4Q09 (EBITDA) was down to $530 million compared to $645 million prior year.  As a friend told me yesterday, it is quite telling that they put Joe Forehand (former chairman and CEO of Accenture) as the interim CEO. Accenture has a huge project going on right now to consolidate the 100s of disparate back end systems within First Data.

SWAGG

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19March 2010

Previous Posts

  • http://tomnoyes.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/att-visa-prepaid/
  • http://tomnoyes.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/obopay-and-firethorne/

What is this? In a nutshell it seems to be a software app that provides for consolidation and creation of pre-paid gift cards. Allowing gift card bar code to be displayed on a cell phone screen so it can be scanned by merchants.

From the SWAGG website we see:

GIVE
Plastic is lame. You’re not.
SWAGG lets you create a personal digital gift and send it to your friend’s mobile device.

GET
Get hooked up. Way up.
SWAGG stays on tops of your favorite brands so you’ll always be the first to know what’s fresh.

GO
Your wallet is full. Of crap.
SWAGG files all your membership and loyalty points neatly under one button.

QCOM CEO, Paul Jacobs comments at CES “”It lets us conduct all sort of transactions on the go…So we can purchase and personalize gift cards, share them with our friends, exchange them with stores we like better. We can use them to buy stuff wherever we are. We can receive personalized offers, We can get loyalty points, manage our rewards programs.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgfn-_lXo0U]

SWAG stands for “stuff we all get.” … sounds much more interesting than Firethorn’s initial mobile balance checking application. I’m a little disappointed this isn’t more NFC focused given QCOM’s tremendous IP portfolio. In this “bar code” model, I can’t help but wonder about conflict w/ Apple’s broad payment patent here

http://www.forbes.com/2007/12/26/apple-patents-iphone-tech-wire-bc_1227appatent.html

Citi “learns lessons” on Obopay

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18 March 2010

American Banker 18 March 2010

Good article.. just a little “too kind”. Citi learned that 2,000 customers found Obopay to be a neat way to give kids their allowance. Of course Citi had higher hopes.. but a sender pays model has rather poor incentives in kick starting a “new network” and consumer behavior (See Citi is out of Obopay).  For those in the industry looking for lessons here, Paybox learned them the hard way in the EU. Obopay’s failure is nothing new.. changing consumer payment behavior is hard. Obopay added a few extra challenges as it attempted to execute a payments business plan with an inexperienced team.

Mobile P2P payments is firmly in the Gartner “hype cycle” stage within developed countries..  The short term future for NFC (at the POS) is quite exciting, particularly with AT&T/Visa’s pending pre-paid card. Within emerging markets, Mobile payment is a game changer for MNOs and the unbanked. The ability of any US tech companies to compete within this emerging market opportunity is TBD as NGOs and MNOs throw substantial resources at the problem.

Interesting to see Obopay start positioning as check (i.e. cash) replacement service. So would you pay $0.25+1.5% of your transaction so that you could provide convenience to a merchant? Me? I think I’ll tell the merchant to take my check.

Hey if the first business strategy doesn’t work… move on.. Jack Dorsey’s square model is focused in a good space (not too keen on his solution though). Obopay.. back to the drawing board.

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ATT-Discover Prepaid

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15 March 2010

Previous Post NFC Break Out – VISA/FirstData/AT&T

My updated prediction is now first week of April. This is real.. and it is imminent.

Q: What will it mean when every AT&T subscriber receives a pre-paid Discover card with an NFC sticker? (Note back in March I did incorrectly guess it was Visa instead of Discover)

Answers

  1. Tipping point for mobile commerce, ushering in a new era where the mobile phone can transact with a wallet that spans the virtual and physical world, aggregating every other account type and payment instrument.
  2. A new business for AT&T which could drive 30-60% growth in LT revenue
  3. Software REVOLUION. The “Next wave” for iPhone AND the entire mobile commerce ecosystem (see googlization)
  4. New mainstream marketing channel as couponing integrates with payment, location awareness and detailed knowledge consumer behavior/preferences
  5. Card business killer for Bank/Issuer revenue as MNO Pre-paid encroaches on the consumer relationship AND issuer debit/credit products (Decoupled Debit)
  6. Cash replacement for small value payments as merchants of all types adapt POS to accept NFC, and small merchants take out POS terminals in favor of making their phone a cash register
  7. .. would love to hear from you on the next 100…

Business Model

Retention or revenue play? AT&T Universal card changed the credit card landscape in 1990. ATT demonstrated it could both create a card business AND leverage  distribution muscle as it attracted over 10M card holders in under 2 years. Citi acquired the AT&T Universal card for $3.5B+ in 1997 and it remains the largest affiliate card in Citibanks’s portfolio.

The biggest variable with anything “consumer facing” is the marketing investment needed to push it into critical mass. Example, will AT&T develop some program to incent “pay by phone” use like a $50 credit with $200 of spend? Discounted airtime rates? Rewards program? AT&T has proven it can deliver new technology and ecosystems (iPhone and Universal card)… and subsequently has many options.

AT&Ts pre-paid revenue model will likely see MUCH lower margins than their 90s card business, perhaps something of a split between a pre-paid card and a “decoupled debit” (which the US banks have long feared). How will customers “load the funds”? How will they encourage bank funding? Will Citibank get its act together and partner to extend credit (existing universal card holders)?

Given that there are many unknowns, here is my high level estimate on year one financials. Assumptions:

  • 85M subscribers (7M iPhone)
  • Year one penetration of 5% (4.25M or 60% of iPhone base),
  • Average purchase amount $40
  • Annual TPV = 50%(85M*0.05*$40*5*12) = $5B  (note: 50% for linear ramp up)
  • Take rate 120bps (Note there are current issues w/ NFC interchange, see BestBuy)
  • Revenue $60M
  • Processing expense (30% of Rev, 100% ACH funding) – $18M
  • Marketing spend – $50M
  • G&A – $3M
  • 12 mo EBITDA – $(11M)

$11M loss obviously doesn’t take into account many unique one time expenses, but it does provide some insight into the dynamics. It seems as though AT&T is spreading out the other “investment costs” through a consortium of First Data, Visa and a number of smaller companies. I would also expect to see a number of new revenue streams (marketing) as merchants experiment with other new Visa sponsored services like mobile coupons. The tech industry needs an initiative like this to expand the “mobile app” world consumer base beyond its current iPhone demographic.

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Firethorn gets new CEO

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9 March 2010

Press Release

Previous Post “Obopay and Firethorn”

Great news for QCOM this week. Firethorn gets a new executive with payments experience… AND has tremendous start up experience. QCOM is one of the best run, most innovative companies on the planet.. they are everywhere in mobile.

Rocco has a clean slate given that Firethorn’s current customer list is rather sparse (?US Bank?). My recommendations for Rocco:

  • Dual track org: Short term quick hit and a strategic initiative
  • Short term: find some low hanging fruit and attack and forget about the banks in short term (they take too long)
  • Long term: better to “enable” 1M+ of businesses than to “own” a single product…. that is the model of QCOM. Example: Authentication. http://finventures.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/5b-mno-opportunity-kyc/
  • Leverage existing assets and relationships, listen for key opportunities
  • HR: Look at the team you have in place and shake it up… substantially. Start cross pollenating with the rocket scientists at the parent company.
  • Financial: I’m sure Rocco worked this out w/ Dr. Paul already.. but there are few path’s to revenue in 2010 unless there are some reallocation of assets.  Example, QCOM is investing in integrating NFC into chipsets. Should this be owned by firethorn? or should just the software that runs on the chipset?
  • Go global. The only alarm bell on Rocco is that he is lacks much international experience. Most of the innovation in mobile (payment) is taking place outside of the US. He needs a solid global team that can ensure that Atlanta prioritizes the global need.

– All the best Rocco

Obopay and Firethorn

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2 March 2010

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Spoke to most of the top 5 US banks this week. Interesting to note that Firethorn is out of all of them.. even in the model where Firethorn paid one of the majors $1M to take the application and integrate it. As of the latest QCOM 10-Q we can now see that total Firethorn revenue was $3M for the 2009 YEAR!  Wow.. no wonder Len lost his head for buying this thing and making it a separate division.

QCOM and Firethorn have a new product planned:  SWAGG (www.swagg.com). Good luck trying to figure out what this thing is.. could this be associated with Visa/ATT? (Youtube here). There seems to be a pre-paid debit card associated with it (from Dr. Jacobs CES presentation). Hey QCOM is one of my favorite companies… the people there are absolutely brilliant. But the Firethorn team is adopted.. and therefore the  genes do not extend here. They need a top exec to drive this thing.

On another note, Obopay showed up to at least one of the top 3 banks last month (BankX) touting its mobile payment solution. Undoubtedly with “millions” of subscribers (actual estimated at less then 20k). Always interesting to see spin here, they also reportedly told BankX that Citi’s departure was only temporary. Other banks should ask them to get specific.. very specific.. (probably not the US and there is no commitment on use).

From compete.com (Hard to spin facts..8,000 unique visits last month .. estimate only 20% use the service)

The “big secret” in mobile payments is that there aren’t any… (with very few exceptions). Those exceptions usually deliver “payments” as part of an existing value proposition (see  MNOs will rule in Emerging Markets). Banks know that changing consumer behavior is a 20 year effort. Card based payment schemes have particularly high hurdles in emerging markets due to interchange rates and rules that are ill suited for low value payments by unbanked. Toward this end countries such as India are contemplating the development of new domestic payment networks.

Thought for the day

RBIs Payments Vision 2012

Social Payments: Paying the Blogosphere

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19 February 2010

This could be the death knell for established news organizations. Having just renewed my subscription to the online Wall Street Journal last week, I was struck at how much of my news comes from informal social networks. I received a call today from a team investigating this space… quite frankly a fabulous payment idea: Paying the blogosphere.

Take a look at Flattr’s YouTube video to get the picture. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwvExIWf_Uc]

One of the many competing w/ Flattr is Kachingle (see patent application). My uninformed opinion is that services in this category can structure themselves as commercial services and avoid MTO regulatory burdens. Kachangle’s approach (described in patent app above) seems to be “billing as a service” … in essence users are buying a service for a fixed monthly subscription at $10/mo. Others “social payment providers” contemplating entry here should be very cautious to avoid used of “tokens” which can be “redeemed” (Big US issues here… See eGold and  US DOJ Final, US DOJ Indictment). The rule of thumb for operating in the US: regular payments for a commercial value added/reseller service.. Good.. flexible payments to anonymous end parties .. Bad.

Key payment considerations

  • Where is NewCo legal entity and target customer base?
  • Where is NewCo operating from?
  • Where is NewCo’s bank account?
  • Is it a commercial service or “money transfer”? You have a regulatory requirements with either, but money transfer services are much more burdensome. If commercial service, then commercial requirements typically dictate disbursement KYC as well as tax/revenue reporting.
  • If service is money transfer, business will not only face regulatory hurdles, but also payment clearing hurdles associated with “payment aggregation”. Networks do not want intermediaries operating a payment network within their existing network as they loose their ability to manage regulatory control (ex. AML, sanctioned payments, …)
  • How does NewCo move money in? Cross border? Who will bear regulatory risk? Clearing bank? Network? NewCo?
  • Are there tokens or other stored units of value that can be exchanged?  

A great blog from a publishers perspective http://steveouting.com/2009/08/28/paycheckr-the-sharethis-for-donation-pay-options/

Customer Sat Survey Released

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18 Feb 2010

ACSI just published results of the customer satisfaction survey.  Wells/Wachovia is #1.. keeping them in the spot for last 5 years (job well done guys).

Wells Fargo has emerged from its acquisition of Wachovia stronger in terms of customer service, rising slightly by 1% to an ACSI score of 73, which is the top score among measured banks in 2009. Wells Fargo seems to have benefitted from Wachovia’s legacy of strong customer satisfaction; for many years, Wachovia was the industry leader. By contrast, JPMorgan Chase has not performed nearly as well following its acquisition of Washington Mutual. The subsequent reorganization has been slow, and many Washington Mutual branches were still not rebranded as of the fourth quarter of 2009. Customer satisfaction with the new, larger JPMorgan Chase dropped sharply by 7% to an ACSI score of 68. To some extent, the story is the same for Bank of America. Its acquisition of Merrill Lynch made it the world’s largest financial services company, but massive losses have led to layoffs and substantial cost-cutting. Bank of America’s ACSI score dropped even further than JPMorgan Chase, tumbling 8% to an industry low of 67.

In addition to ACSI’s overall customer satisfaction report (all bank services) Change Sciences also released a new report this week ranking online banks by “online experience”, in this report Ally bank is ranked #1. The sites usability is just fantastic.. and sets a new bar for the big guys to follow.  Ally (was GMAC) is based in Charlotte and run by the former BAC internet management team. They were able to take the best and brightest from both BAC and Wachovia and have assembled a “dream team” of designers that have taken their game to a new level..  Congrats guys!

PayPal Shut Down in India

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11 February 2010

NYTimes article from last night

India’s Central Bank Stops Some PayPal Services‎ – 

Simply put.. paypal has no license (See RBI list ) for Operating a Payment System in India under India’s Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007. The RBI published Annex I circular on November 27, 2009 (RBI/2009-01/ 236).

It Appears that RBI’s central issue is with PayPal’s role as an “unlicensed” Money Transfer Service. This issue is certainly not new to PayPal (see US Regulations – Online Payment/Transfer). As highlighted in the circular above:

All cross-border inward remittances under MTSS must be accompanied by accurate and meaningful remitter information (name, address and unique identification number of each remittance like, MTCN) on funds transfer and related messages that are sent and the information should remain with the transfer or related message through the payment chain. A unique reference number, as prevalent in the country concerned, must be included.”

Further, Paypal’s “agents must”:

Indian Agents should have effective risk-based procedures in place to identify cross-border inward remittances lacking complete remitter information. The lack of complete remitter information may be considered as a factor in assessing whether a cross-border inward remittance or related transactions are suspicious and whether they should be reported to the FIU-IND. The Indian Agent should also take up the matter with the Overseas Principal if a remittance is not accompanied by detailed information of the fund remitter.

Issue for PayPal is that its “agent” in this case is its commercial bank that initiaties the domestic ACH. My guess is that they are also in a bit of hot water for allowing this connectivity in light of the Nov 2009 circular (and subsequent inaction).

In order to resolve RBI’s issues, PayPal must:

  1. Obtain an MTS License (or a Payment System License)
  2. Renegotiate terms and services with its clearing bank(s) so that they will comply with “Indian agent” responsibilities above, namely PayPal must provide detailed information on remittance (above) to clearing bank and hold information in country so that bank can perform both AML sanction screening and other SAR reporting
  3. Put the detailed technology plan in place capture and send information to bank
  4. Review Plan with regulator
  5. Obtain regulatory approval on end state plan and request exception process for operating until final (end state) is in place

India’s regulators are some of the toughest on the planet. They expect that organizations read their guidelines.. “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” is a regulatory approach that probably works best before you are public company.

Note that PayPal’s “merchant” transactions (where an eBay buyer is paid) are not covered within the MTS regs above, unfortunately for PayPal it is difficult to screen these commercial transactions from other payments,  hence the broader impact in clearing both commercial “merchant” ebay payments and P2P/Remittances. 

My related Post

Cash Replacement

NACHA on Aggregation

SEC AML/Patriot Overview Regs

NFC Tea Leaves

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9 February 2010 

Previous Post http://tomnoyes.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/visa-att-mobile/

In the last week of December I made an “informed” prediction on a major NFC announcement…. the predicted time has now past.. and… no announcement. This seems to be common place in this space.. NFC presents the best chance for development of a new ecosystem and a new “boom” for small companies… Unfortunately the keys to the “ignition switch” are held by multiple established (read entrenched) overlapping and competing networks (bank, mobile, card, …). Apologize for getting hopes up.. it does look like more of a slow burn than “break out”..

Visa’s mobile apps at CES 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Ff6uYXBD0]

VivoTech

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzyy6ZLbDZk]

All of the activity listed in the previous post has been validated:

– FirstData is acting as a TSM (in vein of Germany’s Giesecke & Devrient)

– Visa does have €200MM planned for NFC (See here)

– Top 3 US bank is planning a major mobile initiative w/ Visa to roll out in early 2Q

– AT&T has TBD initiatives into pre-paid card and pre-paid plans, I do have conflicting information on whether this will be led by AT&T or Apple and time period has extended significantly.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=330RZpwrmAg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0BwYz1P0BE