Vritti January, 2016 | Page 11

Mobilution January 2016 11 By Harishankar V As we end another exciting year in mobile payments, let's take a brief look at the landmark events that transpired in 2015. In the course of this brief write up, we will also take a quick sneak peek into the exciting things that we can expect to see in 2016. Tim Cook put succinctly early last year that 2015 is going to be the 'Year of Apple Pay'. This turned out to be debatable as the year went by, but many payment industry experts will agree that innovation in payments was driven firmly by mobile and mobility in 2015. This is even more evident in the number of “OEM Pay” products that were introduced in the market in 2015 as competition to Apple Pay released in late 2014. Let's look at some of the biggest news makers in the payments industry in 2015 The ‘Pays’ of the world With the launch of Android Pay, Samsung Pay and LG Pay technology powered payment services came to the forefront to counter the much hyped Apple Pay in the United States. But the ‘Pay’ phenomenon was not limited to OEMs with Walmart and Chase emerging as two of the biggest proponents of CurrentC - the payment product co-created and piloted by a consortium of US based companies called the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX). The year also saw Apple Pay becoming a global phenomenon with the launch of Apple Pay in UK in partnership with Transport for