Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Are m-payments a threat to PayPal and Google Wallet?

PayPal is the dominant Third Party Payer for e-commerce (web purchasing using a web browser) especially since their acquisition of Verisign's gateway business. Google is also getting into this space (see "PayPal Prepares For a Challenge From Google" from the Wall Street Journal).

Since PayPal's inception, the user experience has been fundamentally the same: a consumer uses her desktop/laptop computer to enter her PayPal username/password and make a payment, without the need to share the payment instrument information with the merchant. Of course PayPal has made enormous strides to strengthen its offering: (1) "integration" with merchants has made the flow of the user experience easier (but fundamentally the same as before), and (2) fraud detection and prevention provides peace of mind to its users (although such protection is a requirement for adoption since credit card companies offer it too).

The question is whether m-payments, i.e., payments using a mobile phone, will be a threat to e-commerce modes of payment like PayPal or the upcoming Google Wallet. The mobile introduces a new payment modality that can easily extend (at least in the case of what Motorola announced, or in the case of PayWi) to online payments. Once you use the mobile for payments, the distinction between physical POS payments and virtual POS payments (PayPal's core business) is rather minor to the user. At the same time, for the consumer, the mobile can bring convenience, ease of use and a sense of ownership of the process (since consumers use their phone, which is always with them). Would that be a disruptive competition for online payment providers?

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