by: Raven Jiang
The history of mobile payments is, upon initial examination, a puzzling one. There are very few ideas in the tech industry that are as clear in their potential utility as user-friendly contactless payment. Enabling technology like near-field communication (NFC) chips has been available for years in both smartphones and retail registers. Mobile payments promised not only to deliver a better user experience, but also to lower the transaction cost for merchants, provide a timely opportunity to ditch the fraud-prone credit card system that has been with us since the 1960s and rethink payment security from first principles.
So why is the history of mobile payments littered with the corpses of ambitious challengers? In the 16 years since the founding of PayPal, why can we still not pay at the Safeway checkout counter with our PayPal accounts? Google Wallet launched over three years ago and to date has failed to achieve any meaningful market penetration. Infamous Stanford startup Clinkle set out to create a revolutionary mobile payment system and ended up shipping a glorified rewards credit card. Meanwhile, Square’s IPO dreams were crushed by the reality that it remains unprofitable.
Apple Pay is the latest in a long line of contenders for the Holy Grail that is mobile payments. By early accounts, it appears to be the strongest attempt so far. The main improvement to the user experience compared to previous attempts like Google Wallet is that security is handled by the fingerprint scanner and as a result, the payment flow does not require you to open the app or enter any PIN. Because Apple Pay merely stores digital tokens for your existing debit or credit cards, it also automatically works with any existing point-of-sale (POS) terminals that are new enough to have NFC support. It is still too early to conclude that Apple Pay has overcome the curse of mobile payments, but it is off to a promising start. The question then begs: Is this a good thing?
