From the Financial Times by Elaine Moore:  Mobile phones will take over from plastic cards and cash as the principal method of payment before the end of the decade, according to new industry forecasts.  But payment providers admit that concerns about the security of cashless transactions – heightened by this week’s software failure at RBS – may deter consumers for some time.  Continued.

Trish’s Comment: 

Many companies have launched mobile payments initiatives ahead of London 2012 wanting to take advantage of the great showcasing and testing opportunities The Games provide.  Moore lists some of them:  Visa’s partnerships with Samsung promoting contactless cards and NFC-based mobile payments, Barclay’s PayTag – a payment tag that sticks to the back of your phone and allows payments of up to £15 - and Pingit – an app that allows you to send money to others using their cell number – and O2 Wallet.  Other interesting ones are PayPal’s inStore – it is being trialed at the Auroria Fashions Group stores and it allows you to pay using a barcode that uniquely identifies your PayPal account – and QuickTap – payment app launched by BarclayCard in collaboration with Orange for NFC-enabled phones.

Now that we are well into the second week of the London 2012 Games, the question is:  Have all these initiatives been able to leverage the Olympics as expected?  Have they gathered the attention and generated the hype that they may have been hoping for?

In my opinion, the answer is yes for Visa and its partnership with Samsung and no for the rest of them, at least not in the very short term.  The focus is on what is happening in the Olympic venues, where Visa – as a key sponsor of London 2012, as of all Olympic Games in the last 25 years – has the exclusive rights to provide payments services.  This leaves everybody else pretty much out of the game for these two weeks.

So, how are Visa and Samsung faring?  Have they managed to make the best of this opportunity?

The answer may be yes from an ‘educational’ perspective.  They have grabbed the opportunity to educate the public about contactless and mobile payments and clearly tied both to the speed and performance of the athletes.  The commercial titled ‘Usain Bolt vs. London’ is a great example of this:  It shows all three ways of paying with Visa – swipe (well, its European version with chip & pin), contactless using a card and contactless using a phone.  All working fast and helping you keep life flowing.