This week, I outlined several of the friction points in the US card payment network in US Payments Where to Invest. Today let me try to articulate a few reasons why US banks are attempting to build a new eCommerce Wallet (Paze) as well as some additional merchant commentary on their efforts.
New Payment Experiences
Topics today (pardon the typos)
The top questions coming out of Money 2020 were: is the US payments environment maturing? Are there still opportunities for break out growth? Where? Who is best positioned and why? Today I will be taking part of that on.
Before listening to anyone on this topic its important to get a feeling for experience. I’ve been fortunate to run two of the largest online banks: Citi and Wachovia. Wachovia was the very first customer of Yodlee (1999), a service our customers loved. My banks were also scraped endlessly, representing over 30% of our traffic and 20% of our call center complaints. We were also the largest PFM bank (think MS Money and Quicken), keeping our OFX servers up and running was key. After my banking life I spent time rearchitecting payment data flows from point of sale to payment at Google. Then spent 8 years creating Commerce Signals, a payment data business.
CPFB’s Proposed Rule
CCCA (Credit Card Competition Act) has been a topic of late, with questions such as: will the bill pass? What will be the consequences? Who will win?
Today I’m providing a brief update on where the CCCA bill stands, and my view on industry consequences in the unlikely event that it passes (previous blog July 2022). The summary? I don’t think the bill will pass. What elected representative wants to be seen killing consumer card rewards in an election year? If CCCA does pass, it will take 6 yrs to implement and the consequences will be borne by Issuers (and consumers) with some added volatility to V/MA. V/MA win when interchange is reduced (ex EU IFR in 2015 – see blog).
Merchant Learnings
This week I was invited to speak at the Merchant Risk Council’s (MRC) – Santa Clara event. As a former banker, I never gave much throught to retailers. Fraud was something I worked to manage with Account Opening/KYC as a core focus because of the potential for regulatory hot water and NCLs as #2 because it drove reserves, profitability and investor scrutiny. Card transaction fraud was something we worked to keep under a threshold.
© Starpoint LLP, 2022. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted in whole or in part in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner.
The CFPB issued a new report last week on the impact that Apple/Google have on payments. Some key excerpts below
I see this as round 4 for Apple. The first rounds were fought with mobile operators and their GSMA TSM vision. The next with Australia (2016) then EU (2019). I find the timing of this report very interesting. As CFPB report came just months after US Issuers pushed Apple to eliminate its 15bps fee (a fee they voluntarily signed up for). I wonder if the CFPB knew that the Issuers collectively sought to eliminate the fee, or that they would like to expand PAZE to NFC/POS in order to lock a new wallet app which would DECREASE BANK COMPETITION (and cut out Apple).
Short Blog – Free Content
© Starpoint LLP, 2023. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted in whole or in part in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner.
My good friend Dave Birch wrote a piece in Forbes last week on Account to Account transfer threat to V/MA. I wanted to provide an alternate view. This will likely be a multi-part blog.. today I’m starting with the consumer and the merchant (from a US perspective).
No new information for my frequent readers, just pulling together some of the latest data (see PIX below).
Continue readingIt’s hard to believe I’ve been writing about payment tokenization for 11 yrs. Tokenization is an overloaded term with multiple definitions. Last week McKinsey wrote a fantastic article on crypto tokenization, this note is about the tokenization of card numbers (PAN to DPAN) performed by network tokenization services like Visa Tokenization Service (VTS) and Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES).
This week the US DOJ opened a probe into network tokenization services (Bloomberg). The specifics of the probe are not known
New consumer terms rolled out at several banks this week. As the former head of online and payment services at Wachvoai (40%+ of Wells) I had managed these agreements. Changes are a very big deal, usually less than once per year. Given my history with Wachovia I chose to review the Wells Fargo below agreement (JPM, BAC, and COF all have similar).
https://www.wellsfargo.com/online-banking/online-access-agreement/
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