Mobile Payments - Who will win the race?

Mobile Payments - Who will win the race?

After Apple's launch of Apple Pay, Samsung's acquisition of LoopPay and announcement of Samsung Pay, Google's acquisition of Softcard and announcement of Android Pay and Facebook's announcement of Messenger Pay, Mobile Payments War is official now!

Also EBay to spin off PayPal into its own business by the end of 2015 and as Business Insider reports there are more than 1486 start-ups in the payments field.

Most companies are focusing on NFC based payment solutions. You see, NFC is a short-distance wireless protocol that requires a phone to be very close to the payment terminal. This is great for security, as it means that while the payment information travels wirelessly, identity thieves can’t easily intercept the information.

However, an NFC system requires retailers to install their own NFC infrastructure – an unattractive proposition for retailers already suffering from low margins, just to chase a tiny market. Also Apple, Samsung, Google all require different NFC infrastructure so most of the retailers wouldn't like to adopt new NFC infrastructure for a tiny market.

Samsung Pay has an advantage here, as it is using LoopPay's MST technology but given that total smartphone market share of Samsung Galaxy s6 would be very tiny, it is going to be difficult for them unless they start making all phones having LoopPay's MST.

PayPal is buying Paydiant, a startup out of Boston that makes mobile wallet technology and they also acquired Venmo last year.

CurrentC, you may recall, was in the news last year when it emerged some merchants that were part of MCX — they include large businesses like Walmart, Target, CVS and many others — were building CurrentC as their own way to take on Apple Pay and other solutions.

In February, Microsoft quietly applied for licensing to be a money transmitter in all 50 states as well as an assortment of current and former US territories.

Recently, in the lead-up to F8, Facebook leaked that payments were coming to Messenger. A week later in the F8 keynote Mark Zuckerberg and David Marcus cracked the door open to Messenger Platform for expression-enhancing apps and opened the shades to what customer service for merchants will look like with Business on Messenger. Facebook says that “This Journey is only 1% Finished.” So if we’ve only seen the first two moves, what does the future of messaging look like?

Well we don't know but it is definitely going to be exciting.

Early Winner Determines the Outcome?

With five of the world’s biggest and most successful tech companies- Apple, Samsung, Google,Facebook, Microsoft and 1500 more payment start-ups fighting to dominate a relatively new industry, it promises to be a fierce and intriguing battle.

But whoever wins in the long run – and there could be multiple winners or maybe even some unknown company may win the battle, critical mass of both users and vendors to finally move mobile payments into the mainstream