In the photo here, from left to right are, the moderator, a Deborah Thoren-Peden, and panelists Braden More, Robert Alvarez, Doug Yeager, and Dan O'Malley. The moderator said that she had once been a Chief Privacy Officer, a fiduciary (in the interest of another, not yourself) role, when such a role was new, but that such a role is no longer a new thing. She sighted a statistic that suggested that cybersecurity in America was shy two hundred thousand needed employees as well.
Braden More of Wells Fargo coordinates marketing to the industry for his company. He said that technology takes away the payment workflow as it stops being an independent thing and instead it just becomes a part of a bigger process which in turn allows engagement based on loyalty and rewards. One of the biggest challenges Braden saw to venture capitalist funded players in the payments space is that there is a need to be able to tell a story and sell a dream. As long as people believe, the checks will keep flowing, but once you hit a door and you stop growing how will you maintain your investors' enthusiasm? Braden suspected that one could create a dating service based just on the data in a bank's records. Your purchase habits tell us where you live and what you like after all, and you could be matched to like-minded persons nearby. There is so very much potential for data mining from banking records that is presently going untapped. In the future, how will it be used? Should it be secured? Apple has been adamant that they will not look at the data collected from Apple Pay, but other entities in similar circumstances make no such guarantees and have very different philosophies. Braden offered that there are already some OTT (over the top) players trying to capitalize on banking data. He suggested that he was rather appalled by Kabbage which asks you for your credentials to log into your Wells Fargo portal on your behalf, scrapes your banking history, and then uses the data to help it in making decisions about giving you a loan! Marketers have had a history of thinking in terms of segments. A segment of eighteen to thirty-six year olds might be an example. In our modern era however segments are one person in size and not a sweeping swath. You have enough information to talk to one person in the moment temporally. The "value pack" text spamming of sales opportunities to anyone marginally a fit is not good practice. The brands you really buy from should be sending you alerts, but not everyone. Alerts need to be relationship-based, and in such a manner may be rewarding and energizing without providing overkill. Neiman Marcus and Starbucks do this well and also allow for in-app payments. With regards to security, make strategic alliances with other players to keep yourself strong. If someone hacks Bank of America it would be ideal for Bank of America to share what it knows of the hacker with other banks so that the villain cannot hop bank to bank causing problems. Albeit, there are regulatory agencies that somewhat prevent the blacklisting of sinister individuals in these circumstances. HCE (host card emulation) risk mitigation has a lot to do with making hackers want to just give up and go somewhere else. Whatever one might say to badmouth HCE security, it is superior to walking around with a plastic card with a bunch of numbers embossed on the side of it. Tokenization is fundamental. (Create fictitious card numbers with a "link back" to the real data point.) Security is a multi-faceted Rubik cube. Many people want to expand the closed-loop environment and have more control in that space. Braden wonders how bill payment might tie into the open-loop space.
Robert Alvarez of Bigcommerce suggested that the number one pain point to setting up an online store (Bigcommerce provides online stores) is not the branding or color themes or the workflow processes but the payment part. Bigcommerce has gotten its time to onboard a new customer down to thirty minutes which is crucial to a healthy revenue stream. Bigcommerce is a SaaS company through four rounds of funding and growing at a rate of eighty percent per year. Research and design is vital if you’re a SaaS company as are metrics and analytics. The onboarding process for your service as a SaaS company needs to be simple. Not every merchant cares about customization, the supply chain, and ERPs, but the bigger of Bigcommerce's merchants do. Bigcommerce has one technical team in Sydney, Australia and another in a San Francisco office. If you are selling online it has to be complete secure and a lot of fraud protection has to be built in. Robert said that Bigcommerce offers an AppStore, for accessing partners for loyalty programs, to its merchants. Bigger players want this. Metrics from point of sales providers that a merchant integrates with are given to the merchant at Bigcommerce's portal. When asked about the challenge of clientele desiring to have an ecommerce solution in house in lieu of in a SaaS shape, Robert suggested that this was a challenge less and less all the time and that he saw an ever-increasing trend towards SaaS solutions. Bigcommerce handles clientele which themselves handle up to one hundred million dollars in volume. Demandware, Inc., a competitor, gets the even bigger fish, but a majority of the fish in the pond (the overall space) are suited to Bigcommerce and Demandware comes with a hefty upfront cost. Bigcommerce helps industry move away from big box retail to small businesses by empowering companies to build a brand. If you sell your stuff on Amazon and eBay you are building their brands and not your own. Fugoo, which sells speakers, grew its brand to such a point that it could get a distribution deal with Apple and now Fugoo speakers may be purchased at an Apple store.
Doug Yeager of SimpleTap said that SimpleTap uses NFC (near field communication, i.e. radio communication with comparable devices) cards to make payments from smartphones at point of sale systems in the Android space. SimpleTap is the Android Pay shadow of Apple Pay. A big Softcard (formerly Isis Mobile Wallet and based on NFC technology) patch for HCE (host card emulation, i.e. a software alone representation of a smart card) was embraced by Google and put into Android to empower this. SimpleTap has just gotten its second round of venture capital funding. When asked about what is most challenging for mobile payments, Doug suggested that as EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) terminals have been deployed, there has often been head trash on the part of merchants to see the devices as only for open loop payment cards (American Express, Visa, MasterCard and Discover) and not for closed-loop, store card options (Home Depot cards for example) which would give a break on an interchange rate. This head trash is not representative of the reality however. Doug said that at SImpleTap they measure their success on the fact that no one knows them. He felt SimpleTap should feel seamless and should not be a part of a regular shopping process that anyone has to think about. PayPal got big into BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) AKA Bluetooth Smart, but it and EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) Dip, where one dips a phone for up to eight seconds to mirror the act of swiping a card, seemed deprecated/archaic to Doug. One had to call in to activate an EMV chip card too. Boo! No one will want to deal with one hundred different wallets and we will need a standard platform. Doug sees in-app purchases growing as a trend.
Dan O'Malley of Mozido said that Mozido is a six-year-old startup in the mobile marketing space that he has been with for about a year. He used to run MoneyGram.com which is sort of a Western Union –style wire-someone-some-money company that dealt with the interesting technical rules of cross-border payments between different nations. He asked the audience: "Anyone not carrying your mobile phone tonight?" ...and nobody put their hand up at that prompt. He followed with: "If you left home without it you likely went back to get it!" What is something that you may do from anywhere in the world? Remittance payments were suggested as an example. A worker in a foreign land may have incentive to send funds back to loved ones in his/her home nation and especially so if the worker does not have banking set up in the new land. As much is an example of a remittance. Mozido has created something like the M-Pesa, the mobile-phone driven money transfer system of Kenya (pesa means money in Swahili), in Jamaica and Sri Lanka in the name of remittance. Mozido does the myDQ Dairy Queen Wallet and they are in the process of acquiring Corfire which manages the wallet for Dunkin Donuts. The two wallets together create a wallet footprint larger than that of the Starbucks wallet. These closed environments allow for company specific payments. Mozido is also becoming a bedfellow of SimpleTap as Dan feels that most of the world's populace is holding an Android phone and not an Apple phone. Everyone in the payment space has "table stakes" (the most one can bet in a game) in security. Dan suggested that none of the guys on the stage could afford a security problem. He suggested focusing on your company's approach to managing security more so than any specific trees in the forest that is security challenges, and later in the talk a member of the crowd expressed disappointment that two things, understanding how your data is governed and social engineering (your employees are your weakest link), were not specifically called out. These concerns arose in the light of the Home Depot, Target, and T.J.Maxx hacks of late and Dan acknowledged that these were important concerns while trying to refocus, again, on managing a bigger, diversified picture (not unlike the picture of Mozido's business model which has its fingers in many varied pies). He said it was important to have many eyes and ears and that it was thus wise to hire outside contractors and consultants with security skills to inject fresh blood. Dan felt marketing to others still needs to boil down to just one thing. Example: Let me sell you one thing. If I could take you down to that level, would you take the next step with me? etc. I need small data, little data on the target audience for this. The volume/prevalence of Opt In and Opt Out safeguards will exhaust users at some point and elate them and make them feel confident in other situations and the tensioning on this dial is very important. Privacy laws are obviously different in different parts of America and in different parts of the world, and this has to be taken into account too making the knob trickier yet to adjust. Dan mentioned a contemporary who had declared that "Privacy is dead." PayEase is a player in the Chinese mobile market. The United States has the biggest remittance market in the world. Many payments leave the US. There is a trend towards organizations building mobile wallets. When will we be able to forego our driver's licenses and use our phones instead? Stripe allows code/applications to accept payments online through an API and Braintree is a rival founded by PayPal.
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