The future of payments

Passion wins was the official mantra for the SIME conference of 2011, and that is exactly why I love this kind of events. You could almost touch the passion when Jacob de Geer entered the stage at shared his story about his latest startup, iZettle.

Jacobs wife, who sell spectacles, asked for his help when she needed to charge her customers by credit card at trade shows, but did not want to buy an expensive card machine.  He did some Googeling around it and did find a company in the US, but who couldn’t give any help until about 3 years. Jacob continued to scan the market and realized that there was a need.

There is a new way to charge, for individuals, non-profits and small businesses, and by connecting the iZettle chip card reader with an iPhone or iPad everyone can charge by credit cards. Since the iZettle was released in August the retail outlets that accept credit cards increased by 5% in Sweden, and they already have 12 000 users, of whom 60% are private individuals, according to Jacob the Geer.

Bonus tip! Drink the best coffee in Stockholm an pay with an iZettle on Cocovaja.

Highlights

Jan Marsalek from Wirecard gave the participants in the workshop Pay Day his insight about the online payment highlights for today and tomorrow:

Trend: convergence

Integration of mobile, payment card issuing, coupons and loyalty. The e-commerce and m-commerce is comming closer together and the point of sale becomes one.

Local is the new global

More countries are launching their own local credit cards and the number of national payment schemes keeps increasing. With more local credit cards, the revenue maintains in the country. The use of as MasterCard and Visa decreases.

Mobile – the hottest topic in payments

Today is the leading mobile payment method is by premium SMS,  but we will see considerably more solutions within the mobile together with Google wallet, Isis and mpass.

The ecosystem of tomorrow

Within ten years it will still be a broad ecosystem of payment solutions as the situation is today. The major difference is that we will use our mobile for 50-60% of our purchases, and the rest will still be a mix of credit card and invoices.