We talked about ClearXchange a bank-led payments initiative. Now 19 of them have decided to come up with a mobile app to compete with Venmo ... here on Bloomberg
Venmo is owned by PayPal and is a mobile wallet ... problem is cashing out takes days. As well there appear to be some security, fraud and consumer protection issues according to Time.
Venmo is trying to counter this by speaking with card networks - problem is cards are costly due to interchange.
Thanks to Fenny for this. This is the 2013 report. Please do have a look and read beyond the summary of the results. The good (or bad) thing about data is that it can be interpreted in more than one way.
So despite the high growth rates for emerging market economies, rich countries dominate in non-cash payments (volume) and are likely to continue to do so. Expect to see new innovations coming out of rich countries. Cards are also quite dominant (though debit is growing faster than credit), so it is unlikely that a new entrant can ignore the incumbents. If they treat card companies as complementors, the dominance of cards is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Banks also continue to be dominant players in the M-Payments market.
Also, expansion (and investment) is taking place is less regulated markets. This is also not surprising for two reasons. First, new technology roll-outs are like the gold rush. Initially everyone is just trying to grab some real estate so they can dig for gold - once too many people start doing that there is encroachment - people start worrying about property rights ... putting up fences ... hiring guards etc. That is the time when industry goes to government and asks for regulation. The second reason is just that companies like to play the regulatory arbitrage game. PayPal is a good example - in Luxembourg the company is registered as a bank only because the regulations allow it. In other markets with more stringent regulation, they could just be a money transfer company. So they are just playing whatever game the regulations allow them to play.
Yet PayPal is disingenuous enough to lobby APEC/ASEAN etc. for harmonization of regulations. I suspect it may be a good idea to decide what you do (or don't do) before you ask for the same rules across countries. And in any case, the way the world is headed, harmonization is a bit of a pipe dream for the tech sector. Privacy laws and data protection laws vary quite substantially across countries and the Snowdon revelations are going to increase variance across countries. So dis-harmonization is where we are headed. It is for this reason that Microsoft has decided to allow local storage of data ... in other words every country can have its own cloud ... even small ones. Which really makes no sense since the cloud is all about scale. But perhaps it's a recognition of the sociopolitical reality in which business must be conducted.