Industry Perspective

Toward Mobile Payments

May 2012

The fall 2011 issue of Forefront, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s policy magazine, featured an article entitled, "Toward Mobile Payments", (Off-site Link) written by Dan Littman, an economist at the Cleveland Fed and Cindy Merritt, assistant director in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. We are sharing a reprint of the article below. In addition, we are sharing the findings of a March 2012 Federal Reserve Board survey as summarized in Consumers and Mobile Financial Services.

 

 

Toward Mobile Payments Reprint

Pop quiz: Where are consumers more likely to use their smartphones for making payments at the checkout aisle—the United States or Kenya?

Surprise! It’s Kenya, but that may change as U.S. financial services providers catch up with the rest of the world. The concept of mobile payments is new enough to require some explanation. First, there’s a difference between mobile payments and mobile banking.

Mobile banking services allow you to do things like monitor account balances, transfer funds, and receive alerts—pretty much anything you can do with a web browser from your computer. Mobile payments, on the other hand, let your smartphone double as a debit or credit card.

Although they still sound like the stuff of science fiction to many Americans, mobile payments may be commonplace sooner than most people think. Just as ATMs took off and paper checks all but vanished, mobile payments could spread like wildfire. It’s partly a matter of getting the infrastructure and operating agreements in place. For its part, the Federal Reserve is working to ensure that when mobile payments do arrive en masse, they will operate in an environment as safe and secure as other payment channels.

Just two years ago, the Federal Reserve—led by the Atlanta and Boston Reserve Banks—convened a working group to share knowledge about mobile payments and banking developments in the United States. The idea was to organize a meeting of industry stakeholders in the emerging mobile financial services industry and discuss some of the barriers to U.S. adoption of the mobile channel.

Clearly, U.S. mobile banking services were gaining traction. Banks large and small quickly recognized the need to add value and convenience to their products and compete with banks already offering mobile services.

But U.S. mobile payments services weren’t yet catching on. For example, one form, the mobile proximity payment, remains a rare transaction in the U.S. It enables you to use a mobile handset at the merchant’s point-of-sale terminal to purchase goods and services. In effect, the mobile phone substitutes for swiping a credit or debit card through the card slot on the terminal. The buyer simply waves the phone in front of a device at the pay station. Once the payment information from the phone enters the device, it rides the same payment rails as a debit or credit card.

A few developing countries have been the real hotbed of mobile payments. In those nations where people tend to rely on basic mechanisms of exchange, such as cash, mobile telephony has enabled consumers to leapfrog a generation of payment instruments like checks and credit cards. They use their mobile phones as a substitute for bank branches and ATMs, which don’t exist in most rural areas. By doing so, they achieve a more secure, accessible banking and payments environment than was possible before. Kenya and South Africa are among the countries where mobile payments are drawing previously unbanked people into the modern banking system.

But why not here in America? We already have advanced payments systems, which are safe and secure and complicate the business case for mobile payments. Moreover, so many players are involved here that coordination is difficult. That’s not true in many emerging countries, where a single telecom provider may serve the entire nation, and there may be only a handful of banks.

 

A Change in the Landscape

Still, a number of new payment service rollouts and trials are emerging in the United States. Telecom carriers, banks, and technology service providers are partnering in new ventures to offer mobile wallet applications by Google, PayPal, and Isis. On the person-to-person payments front—in which parents, for example, can pay babysitters through their mobile phones—three of the nation’s largest banks have announced a payment transfer service that will enable customers to move money from their checking accounts by using either an email address or a phone number.

In August, Visa announced its intention to encourage chip technology for credit card payments. That means cards will be equipped with microchips that can be read by point-of-sale devices, replacing the magnetic stripe technology now used by most merchants. The next generation of point-of-sale devices will accommodate chip-embedded cards as well as mobile phone payments.

So where does the Federal Reserve fit in? Broadly speaking, the Fed’s role is to help ensure that the U.S. mobile payments system is safe and secure. With consumers adopting mobile payments, the Fed has an interest in keeping the system as efficient and orderly as before while providing access to as many users as possible.

 

What Next?

Ubiquitous mobile payments are not only possible but almost inevitable. As the landscape changes, the industry is moving to create a secure, interoperable, and universal channel for mobile payments. Many questions remain as handset and chip manufacturers, telecom companies, card networks, financial institutions, and software providers all try to get a foothold in mobile payments. Some of the questions are smaller—how will consumers know who to call when they encounter a problem? Some are larger—how exactly will the different players come together to smoothly handle mobile payments through electronic channels? The Federal Reserve’s Mobile Payments Industry Workgroup continues to sort through challenges like these.

 

UPDATE ON MOBILE PAYMENTS

One out of five American consumers used their mobile phone to access their bank account, credit card, or other financial account in the 12 months ending in January 2012 and an additional one out of five indicated they would likely use mobile banking at some point in the future, according to a recent Federal Reserve Board survey. The survey's findings suggest that the use of mobile banking is poised to expand further over the next year, with usage possibly increasing to one out of three mobile phone users by 2013. However, the survey indicates that many consumers remain skeptical of the benefit of mobile banking and the level of security associated with the technology. The survey findings are summarized in Consumers and Mobile Financial Services published in March 2012 by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

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