The Future of Payments: Prepaid cards, contactless and mobile payments

SUMMARY

As we move towards the so-called ‘cashless' society, and consumers increasingly want the ability to make payments online and on their mobile phones - safe in the knowledge that transactions are secure - the face of the payments landscape is changing. Card payments have increasingly become an important part of our everyday lives, especially as more and more people utilize the Internet and financial institutions offer various payment services that preclude writing checks or using cash. From a business standpoint and despite growing transaction volumes, financial institutions are facing margin pressures on their payments businesses as competition has grown. From a technology standpoint, there has been little change in the past two decades. However, there are indications that suggest the next few years will yield interesting developments. This report considers the current market for payments technologies and provides an analysis of how the sector could evolve.

The Future of Payments: Prepaid cards, contactless and mobile payments is a new report published by Business Insights that examines the current market for a range of existing payment technologies and processes, and how this will drive the future of payments. This report predicts how payments trends will change in Europe, the US and Asia Pacific as well as examining potential marketing strategies. It also considers the drivers and risks for each key technology including mPayments, contactless payments, and co-branded and prepaid card schemes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Future of Payments

• Market context: The US and Europe
• Market context: Asia Pacific and pre-paid cards
• The future of co-branded cards
• Contactless payments
• Mobile payments

Chapter 1 - Market context: the US and Europe

• Summary

• Introduction
• Prepaid cards
• Contactless payments

• Market issues
• SEPA

• Future strategies
• Payments fraud

Chapter 2 - Market context: Asia-Pacific and pre-paid cards

• Summary

• Introduction
• Definitions
  • Affinity cards
  • AAGR
  • Balances outstanding
  • Branded prepaid cards
  • CAGR
  • Co-branded cards
  • Private-label cards
• Prepaid cards
• Pre-paid markets
• The European market vs the US and Japan
• The youth market
• Corporate market
• Unbanked customers

• Conclusions
• Teen market
• Corporate and government sectors

Chapter 3 - The future of co-branded cards

• Summary
• Market context
• Loyalty schemes
• Types of co-branded card programs
• Benefits to card issuers of co-branded programs
• Benefits to merchants of co-branded card programs
• Risks

• Conclusions
• Product differentiation
• Co-branding relationships
• Market share in growing markets
• Co-branding profitability
• High costs

Chapter 4 - Contactless payments

• Summary
• Market context
• Market sizing
• Conclusions
• Potential obstacles and solutions
  • Interoperability
  • Security
  • Cost
• The future
  • The Americas
  • Asia-Pacific
  • Europe

Chapter 5 - Mobile payments

• Summary
• Defining mobile payments
• Market context
• Costs and risks
• Market drivers

• mPayment trials
• Mobipay - Europe's great mPayment success story?
• NTT DoCoMo - turning the mobile phone into a contactless e-wallet
• The collapse of Simpay
  • Problem 1: Premium SMS is a highly inflexible means of payment
  • Problem 2: A lack of common standards makes life difficult for merchants and restricts cross-border sales

• Conclusions
• Payment and billing structures
• Interoperability and acceptance
• The cost of accepting mPayments
• The future

• Index

List of Figures

• Figure 1.1: European retail banks' payment project priorities
• Figure 1.2: European retail payment players
• Figure 1.3: Retail banks' fraud priority areas
• Figure 2.4: Prepaid cards have their place in the current payment card landscape
• Figure 2.5: Asia-Pacific target youth market, 2007
• Figure 3.6: Defining card partnership models
• Figure 3.7: Combining brand and expertise in a co-branding relationship
• Figure 4.8: Global market opportunity for contactless payments
• Figure 5.9: Cash is the dominant payment mechanism for transactions up to the value of £10.00 in the UK
• Figure 5.10: NTT DoCoMo has taken the traditional mobile phone proposition and added extra functionality 101
• Figure 5.11: Applications for mobile payments 111

List of Tables

• Table 2.1: Forecast prepaid card spend by country ($bn), 2010
• Table 2.2: Asia-Pacific target youth market (0-17 years), 2007
• Table 2.3: Youths and their aspirational ages
• Table 3.4: forecast for pay later card numbers across five markets, 2006- 2010
• Table 5.5: The aspects of the mPayment value chain that interested parties are keen to secure or avoid