The payments industry is undoubtedly facing a period of tremendous change, centered at the moment around the transformation of payments at the point of sale. Likewise, the electronic bill payment and presentment industry is entering a new phase of transformation, spearheaded by digital mailboxes and new aggregators. Manilla, Zumbox, Doxo, and Pitney Bowes’ Volly are the key players in that U.S. market at the moment. These players represent a threat for existing biller-direct vendors as well as for the banks and their vendors that offer bill payment and/or presentment via online and mobile banking. Digital-mailbox players and other aggregators are … Continue Reading →

A striking finding from our recent survey of large-bank CIOs around the world is the disconnect between banks’ interest in merchant acquiring and their interest in digital wallets and mobile payments. Over the next 24 months, a massive number of banks will increase IT spending on digital-wallet and mobile payments on the issuing side; very few, however, will invest in merchant acquiring, a business that many divested years ago or have been running too long as a separate entity to even see it as part of the bank. Yet, banks should coordinate their mobile payment/digital wallet strategy with their merchant … Continue Reading →

In a recent Aite Group survey of large bank CIOs and bank IT executives in North America, we investigated the long-term outlook of their vendor relationships. As some large enterprise vendors increasingly move into providing financial-services-specific applications (think Oracle), we wondered whether IT executives could see their banks moving away from working with traditional bank technology vendors (think FIS, Fiserv). We found that one in four bank IT executives “strongly agree” with the following statement: “Over the next decade, I expect my organization to rely more on large IT vendors for supplying not merely horizontal technology, but also a range of … Continue Reading →

Amex is launching a new mobile payment solution that enables consumers to consolidate all of their cards onto one and choose via mobile which funding method they use at the point of sale. We view the launch as the first credible move by a major card network and issuer to build an early-stage mobile-payment wallet, independent of the telcos, in the United States. We call the solution elegant and intermediary. Intermediary because it involves getting consumers in the habit of using their mobile phones to drive their payments without being a true mobile payment solution. Elegant because it means that Amex can … Continue Reading →