12
January 2016
Mobilution
P2P and Social Payments
Person to Person payments has been around
for a long time, with PayPal being the pioneers
of this industry. But 2015 saw a clear
resurgence of P2P payments with a social
angle built into it. With a drastic increase in
smartphone usage among ‘Gen X’, the need
to instantly transfer money to friends and
family greatly increased.
The year saw PayPal going public with a current
market cap of $46B - almost twice that of the
company that it split from. Google Wallet also
became a P2P payment system in 2015 after
Android Pay become the de-facto merchant
payment app.
The year also saw a great many new social
payment initiatives being introduced. Some of
the most popular social messaging platforms
in the world like Snapchat, WeChat and Line
started providing P2P services integrated into
their very popular messaging apps.
Venmo got great coverage and saw a great
increase in its usage in 2015. Facebook also
launched its own P2P service using the
Messenger platform easing sending and
receiving money across platforms. Square
also launched its own P2P social payments
platform called Square Cash which was much
talked about.
With more than $13B transferred socially in
2015, the sector is warming up with more
action expected in 2016.
US’s EMV Migration
With the USA migrating to EMV in 2015, the
last bastion of EMV in the developed world
has been finally breached. The concept of Chip
Card is still new in the US, but banks have
finally woken up to the opportunities available
in the mobile payments segment and started
issuing EMV based Chip Cards to their
customers with existing cards being reissued
as Chip and PIN or Chip and Sign cards.
The migration has not been without its usual
share of problems. The biggest issue seems
to be the longer customer checkout time due
to the card remaining dipped inside the point
of sale system for the duration of the
transaction. The lack of training among the
retailers in the usage of Chip cards is also
hurting the actual adoption and usage of Chip
based cards. Many merchants are still
swiping cards with Chips in them, since the
acceptance systems have not changed.