What’s needed to do payments right

Ubiquity is a primary requirement for a successful payments system, executives at PayPal believe. "A payments service needs to be everywhere to be effective," says Sam Shrauger, VP Global Product and Experience, PayPal. 


That puts PayPal in the camp of would-be and developing mobile payments providers that really must look for ways to create a universally-available service, without the limitations of mobile device operating systems, communications capabilities or input-output methods on the consumer side of the business.

PayPal also would like to avoid forcing the essential merchant partners to invest in upgrades to their point of sale terminals, especially at a time when there are many ways to handle the communications part of the process.

"Very narrow payment offerings," then, are not the approach PayPal will take when it does reveal what it plans to do in the mobile payments space. PayPal does believe that whatever it does, it will have to be compelling enough "to make people change their current behavior."

Others will take the other approach, which is to create "niche" offerings. Starbucks and Square probably are the best examples of that at the moment. Starbucks only cares about what its own consumers do, at Starbucks locations. Square really is optimized to enable non-traditional retail payments in scenarios where the retailer doesn't own, doesn't use, or cannot use a traditional POS terminal.

To really “do payments” right, you’ve got to have more than just technology," says Shrauger. "Above all, any new solution has to deliver something better than what exists today. Not just new and different–better."

PayPal already has introduced retail payments on a limited scale in the United Kingdom, so it already is moving down the track of retail payments at physical locations.

What’s needed to do payments right