INTERVIEW: Jumio’s chief sales officer on the mobile payments market

Jumio's chief sales officer Mike Orlando

The mobile payments market keeps growing, if not in terms of consumer uptake then certainly the number of services available. But while services such as Square and Google Wallet hog the column inches, Jumio is tackling the market from a different angle: enabling consumers to snap their card using their PC or smartphone camera. Jumio chief sales officer, Mike Orlando, talks to StrategyEye about the firm’s progress. 
pay.jumio.com 

@Jumio

¤ What are the plus points of Jumio compared to its rivals?
We’ve seen a lot of people have a lot of affinity for the scanning technology, both from a usability user interface perspective, as well as the security aspects, the speed at which we can process the transaction. As we look at those other competitors out there we don’t see ourselves as directly competing with the hardware devices as much as trying to convey a different message and approach the market from a very different perspective.

¤ How important is mobile to Jumio?
It’s huge. It’s really where we’re going, both from the payment acceptance side with the card scanning and as we move more towards ID verification and know-your-customer technologies, bringing that to mobile is going to be critical for us.

¤ Are you geared more towards merchants or consumers? 
Today we’re really geared towards the merchant. We provide the infrastructure and accessibility of the technology to the merchants. Over time, we want to create an ecosystem where consumers get comfortable with scanning technology and understand the benefits of it and going to participate with merchants that offer scanning technology either for credit card users, for payments, or again on the ID side.

¤ How important is your recent partnership with Travelocity and what others are in the pipeline?
It’s huge. It has helped us make some inroads with many of the other travel sites. In addition, it gave us credibility in the marketplace as we’re looking to expand into other areas, so into pure-play retail, and into financial services. We’ve had other deployments and launches, but it is the first major company to launch its mobile app using our SDK. We’re going to see a lot of deployments and some new announcements in the coming months.

¤ What are Jumio’s user numbers?
We are keeping that pretty close to our chests. But we are getting a lot of traction with both services. We distinguish between the Netswipe and Netswipe Mobile, which is the card-scanning, and the Netverify ID side.

¤ What does Jumio aim to achieve in 2013?
First of all, seeing all our technologies embedded into mobile. We have some advancements to do to deploy in a mobile environment across all platforms, so it’s ubiquitous regardless of the mobile platform. Also, we aim to have an initial account in all the sectors that we want penetration. We have one today in travel with Travelocity, we’re also talking with a number of airlines, and financial services and gaming are two of our other of key verticals. So we aim to land those accounts then have them go live within the first sixth months of 2013.

¤ How important is the user experience in helping Jumio differentiate itself?
That’s the critical thing. What we want to do is to set proof points to our merchants when they deploy and the biggest one is conversion. Within a mobile app, you see an 80% drop off in card payments – people have to key in their numbers. We’ve seen with the deployments we have today, reported increases of up to 20% in conversion using the scanning. So we want to be able to bring that value both to the merchant and the experience within the mobile apps convenient for the customers.

¤ How do you see mobile and online payments markets evolving?
There are definitely a lot of players in the mobile payments space today. You’re going to see a lot more entrants, because where there’s a lot of excitement people tend to jump in. I also think as more entrants come in, you’ll see some consolidation. You’ll see people either get acquired or embedded in others’ applications. Whether it’s in the next six months or a year, you’re definitely going to see that, and I think you’ll see also some stabilisation with pricing and rates. There’s been a bit of a race to the bottom thus far with a lot of the companies that are doing the processing. You’ll see that stabilise and the stronger players and those with the better value proposition will begin to gain share.

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