The mobile payments space is heating up as PayPal’s owner, eBay, ups its estimates for total mobile payments volumes for the year, and Google’s Wallet service rolls out across more merchants in the US. eBay CEO John Donahoe says that the volume of payments will now top USD3.5bn in 2011, up from a previous forecast of USD3bn. The revisions come as eBay is set to report its Q3 earnings this week, and PayPal pushes a raft of new mobile tools to link online and offline retail.
As PayPal seeks to imitate its foothold in online payments offline, Google is rolling out its mobile wallet app to work across more partner retailers, along with a new feature dubbed SingleTap, which enables users to pay for items, redeem coupons or earn rewards points in a single touch of their phone. Google has also updated the discounts section of its app, now called ˜Featured Offers’, to include deals exclusive to the firm, while users can also add loyalty cards from more retailers to the wallet.”It’s still early days for Google Wallet, but this is an important step in expanding the ecosystem of participating merchants to make shopping faster and easier in more place,” says Google.
Despite its push into payments, Google is likely to have a tough time dislodging PayPal, which remains the most popular online payments brand and has taken a holistic approach to expanding its payments platform, offering mobile payments, loyalty programmes and location-based deals. eBay’s X.commerce will additionally allow developers to create features such as shopping carts, payment services or inventory management for merchants online. However, unlike Google, PayPal is focusing less on the wave-and-pay technology, stating that near-field communication technology adoption in the mass market is still years away.
Whitepapers
Related reading
Central banks best suited to issue digital currencies
By Aaran Fronda A recent report by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) said that central banks rather than private ... read more
Instant payments: innovations inbound for corporates
In 2020, instant payments look set to continue their current trajectory to become the biggest trend in payments. While these schemes already offer numerous benefits to corporates, leveraging innovations such as APIs and request to pay will go some way to unlocking their full potential, argues Michael Knetsch
Obstacles exist for banks to meet ECB’s instant payments goal
The cost of joining instant payment platforms will be one of many hurdles banks and payment services providers must overcome to meet ... read more
Banks must be aware of “biases” in data used to train ML models
Financial institutions need to be conscious of biases in the historical data that is being used to train machine learning (ML) models, ... read more