Wal-Mart Announces Walmart Pay for Mobile Payments

Pretty enormous news in payments, retail and mobile as Walmart announced Walmart Pay today.

Due to my previous professional involvement in MCX, a consortium of retailers including Walmart who are developing a mobile wallet solution, I am going to keep my comments to a minimum.

Here is a story on this news:

http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/story/Despite-Observers_-Doubts_-Wal-Mart-Says-Walmart-Pay-Won_t-Weaken-Ties-to-MCX

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Starting this month, Wal-Mart will begin testing “in select stores” a service called Walmart Pay, which will be part of the Wal-Mart shopping app and will work with most Apple and Android smart phones, the company says. Customers will be able to load “major” card brands along with the Wal-Mart gift card in the wallet, which will link to point-of-sale readers via quick-response (QR) codes, according to the announcement. The full rollout to all Wal-Mart stores is expected to be complete by the middle of next year.

This sounds pretty similar to the CurrentC solution developed at MCX.  It will be very interesting to see how this develops over time.  Starbucks and Dunkin' Brands use a similar style solution while the tech companies use NFC or other hardware solutions to interact with payment terminals.

Given the very slow adoption Apple Pay is seeing, Google Wallet already went through (now Android Pay), and Samsung Pay is seeing as well it is possible these "retail first" solutions are the way this will be solved.  Just look at Starbucks.  Dunkin' Brands is seeing similar success.  Will each major retailer have to develop their own proprietary mobile payments capability?  That seems inefficient.  Will the Apple Pays of the world ever take off?  Will a "white label" style solution like CurrentC at MCX be the one?

This seems to be a very long slog.  I was involved with this for years and I see many more years ahead.  It will be fun to follow this line though.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant