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AN INTERVIEW WITH ROY VELLA


THE FUTURE OF MOBILE PAYMENTS


By Kelly Dolan T


he mobile payments revolution has begun. Cheques are declining in usage; most of our banking activity has moved online and


digital players such as Square, Apple’s Passbook and Google Wallet are all vying for the number one spot in mobile payments and transactions. And now that mobile payments have been cited as the ‘next great frontier’ for smart phones, it has never been a more exciting time to start casting predictions on what the future holds and how the consumer buying experience will change as a result.


Rising above the rumours is Roy Vella, mobile services expert, entrepreneur and the ex-head of mobile payments at PayPal. Describing himself as a ‘strong customer experience advocate with a passion for growing businesses in the mobile and web technology industries’ I speak to Roy to hear his predictions for the mobile payments space and what he believes key players need to take into account in order to succeed.


Roy begins our interview by mentioning his time at PayPal. “Before the whole mobile thing became big we realised at PayPal that online payments were in the billions” he says. “But the problem we had was Visa and MasterCard didn’t care about PayPal because the real world of payments was worth trillions.


“To be


“PayPal is a small part of a small pond and I was like ‘look, we want to be a small part of a large pond and have a bigger space so we have to get PayPal unplugged, offline and into the real world if we want Visa and MasterCard to care.’ I wanted PayPal to be a payments player and to be at the point of sale in real world payments, not just digital and online payments.


“The reality is that the world of payments came to us through the rise of smart phones and mobile – it digitised the real world. With the birth of the iPhone we all started to carry around pocket computers instead of phones.”


Two big mobile payment providers taking advantage of the huge pool of consumers now handling smart phones were


36 entrepreneurcountry


successful in mobile payments you need two things – density and frequency”


Google Wallet and ISIS. What did Roy make of both players?


“Google has money to burn and for them


it is all about data, payments are a side note” Roy says. “They are not looking at the payment industry and thinking ‘There is so much money to be made there.’ Google make plenty of money just through the traditional advertising that they do.


“All they want to do is extend that advertising and put their adverts in front of the consumer wherever the consumer is. They want to create advertising that is highly targeted. That means getting integrated into people’s devices and getting involved in a commerce chain.


“Google Wallet also bet big on NFC and that was probably a mistake. NFC is a brilliant technical solution but it’s not really solving a problem. Buyers are sort of just left thinking ‘I guess it’s cool that I don’t have to touch the reader but I’m not sure how that is useful to me.’


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