Shortsighted strategies that involve exclusive deals and attempt to lock consumers in to single products will fail as mobile retail and banking applications.
"For the retailer, accepting mobile payments and vouchers means integrating new technology at every till or point of sale (POS) and that is an expensive and time-consuming operation. From their perspective, it makes no sense at all to go to all that trouble just to support a single app that only a minority of their customers will use."
The company is now seeing retailers paying increasing attention to future-proofing mobile strategies. "Retailers are recognising that they need to give consumers choice about the mobile tools they use and accommodate a variety of different phone types and operating systems. They also need to give themselves the ability to design and launch campaigns with any partner they want."
Constant uncertainty about what new technologies will become popular in the future is another important driver, he says. "Right now everyone is predicting that near-field communications (NFC), which will enable people to pay for their purchases just by tapping their phones, is the next big thing and the company has a solution to enable this in an open and consumer centric fashion. But we have no real idea what's coming after that, except that it will be sooner than we'd like."
For retailers the solution is to embrace interoperability. "What you want is an open platform that you can implement and integrate into once and then use to turn on any mobile transaction application you want, now or in the future."
Ducasse is betting his company that this is the way of the future, having turned it from a single mobile wallet provider among many a few years ago, into an open and strategically important platform play that is already seeing success with major retailers.
"18 months ago, we had just 5000 mobile transactions a month through WiPlatform. By February 2013 that was up to 390 000 transactions and still growing rapidly. We are seeing a strong demonstration of the value of being part of an open system that gives both retailers and their customer's choice and flexibility."
