“Mobile payment technologies have an interesting and complicated relationship with local businesses. On the one hand, local mom-and-pop restaurants, shops, and services are probably the companies that you’d expect to adopt new payment technologies the slowest – particularly if those technologies require new point of sale hardware like an NFC reader,” Ryan Faas reports for Cult of Mac. “On the other hand, mobile payment systems could be poised to deliver a new wave of business to such local companies.”
“Then there’s all the NFC-oriented partnerships going on around the world between banks, mobile carriers, and device makers. You also have location and industry-specific options like Tabbedout. And you have organizations like Amtrak delivering their own apps and related payment systems,” Faas reports. “With this much fragmentation, it’s easy to see why Apple is hanging back from lunching an iWallet.”
Faas reports, “The company is actually being very smart with its Passbook app. Passbook is a great tool for small and local businesses. It also offers Apple a way to build relationships with mom-and-pop companies. Once it has done so, Apple could easily expand those relationships and offer mobile payment services pretty quickly… All before its competitors realize what’s happening.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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