By Eric Dunn, Senior Vice President, Payments Initiatives, Intuit
The adoption of smartphone-based mobile banking is one of the fastest trends in digital banking. While today’s smartphone applications, for the most part, mirror the functionality of bank websites with balances, transfers and bill pay, a new frontier is opening with the proliferation of mobile wallets and payment solutions. Already, hundreds of thousands of retail point-of-sale terminals support near field communications (NFC) protocols such as PayPass (MasterCard) and PayWave (Visa). Industry forecasts for smartphones suggest that at least 50 percent of new smartphones will be NFC-capable within 18 months.
As the new frontier of smartphone-based mobile payments is unfolding, there is uncertainty for financial institutions. How will banks and credit unions participate? Some industry players — PayPal, Google, the wireless carriers and others – are designing mobile payments ecosytems in a way that could reduce the role of banks.
As a business partner to many financial institutions, Intuit wants to share some of our newest thinking about the mobile payments landscape, and in particular how banks and credit unions can preserve or expand their role in payments during the evolution to digital and mobile. Specifically, Intuit has been working closely with terminal manufacturers and others in the mobile payments ecosystem to develop a working prototype of an NFC-based payment solution that is complementary to smartphone-based mobile banking.
What’s on your mind about mobile payments? Is this a payment option your financial institution is interested in offering? To join the conversation visit In:Volve.