Smartphone payments are being used on an increasing basis, but the Merchant Customer Exchange is standing still.
At a time in which many of the biggest players in tech and the financial industries have been putting out their own mobile wallet apps, one of the most highly anticipated additions to the market has remained notably absent from this market.
The Merchant Consumer Exchange (MCX) has been talking about its mobile payments, but still has no offerings.
The MCX has been discussing the development of its mobile wallet for quite a while now, but doesn’t have anything for consumers to use. It is now causing experts and analysts to wonder what type of value the consortium of retailers and merchants will be able to bring to the market, which is already approaching maturity. The wallet app is expected to be called CurrentC, but aside from that name, there really isn’t anything that is available to use, quite yet.
Equally, there are some who believe that a late entry of CurrentC as a mobile wallet may be a positive choice.
According to the Dorado Industries principal, John MacAllister, he believes that “The fact that CurrentC is not up and running is not a bad thing.” MacAllister spoke in Las Vegas at the All Payments Expo, representing his consulting firm.
As a part of the same conversation at the expo were Tim Sloan, the Mercator Advisory Group vice president of payments innovation, as well as Steve Mott from the BetterBuy Design consulting firm. They discussed the way that current technologies for mobile payments function within the existing marketplace. Each of those experts came to an agreement in which they felt that if MCX is able to push its CurrentC wallet app beyond its present status as a pilot phase with very limited use, then it could be possible for it to achieve a certain degree of success.
So far, the limited pilot testing of the CurrentC systems have shown quite a large amount of struggle. For example, it faced massive competition when Apple Pay entered the marketplace. Rite Aid and CVS – two of the MCX partners – went so far as to shut off the support for contactless technology as that blocked the use of NFC which is required by Apple Pay. Later, CurrentC pilot participants were contacted to tell them that the system had been hacked.