DailyTech - Isis Decides Not to Establish Separate Mobile Payments Network

Submit News

Gadgets Isis Decides Not to Establish Separate Mobile Payments Network
Tiffany Kaiser - May 4, 2011 10:52 AM

2 comment(s) - last by Solandri.. on May 4 at 12:47 PM

(Source: chinazrh.com)

Isis will attempt to embrace the large credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard

Three of the United States' largest wireless carriers have decided not to establish a separate network for mobile transactions due to the difficulty and time consumption of this task.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA came together to form Isis, which was supposed to be a group effort "to take market share away" from MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. through its own mobile payments network. In addition, Isis was to use Discover Financial Services' national payment network, which consists of 7 million U.S. merchant partners.

While Isis still plans to partner with Discover, a spokesman for Isis said it is still open to "new alliances." Also, Isis feels it needs to embrace other major credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard in order to insure that it does not fall behind in the mobile payments market.

Now, Isis is establishing a "mobile wallet," which will store and exchange financial account information on a consumer's MasterCard, Visa, etc. via mobile devices. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are currently negotiating with Visa and MasterCard regarding the mobile wallet, and hope to bring both credit card giants onboard.

Enlisting Visa may prove to be advantageous because the global payments technology company seems to be in almost every realm of the NFC world. For instance, Visa offered a personal payments service to those with eligible Visa accounts, allowing them to exchange money with one another without the use of cash or checks. In addition, Visa just joined Samsung in an NFC venture for the London 2012 Olympic Games, and more recently, the credit card heavyweight invested a large sum of money in the Square mobile payments startup.

Comments

Threshold

Username
Password
remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

So much for competition.

By Denithor on 5/4/2011 11:34:31 AM , Rating: 2

Visa & MC just continue along their course to world domination...

RE: So much for competition.

By Solandri on 5/4/2011 12:47:10 PM , Rating: 4

Course to? They already dominate the world. I can't believe we let 3* companies leech 1%-2% off of nearly every non-cash merchantile transaction for doing virtually no work. *(4 if you include Discover, but they have almost no presence outside the U.S.)

Surcharges and fees like this should be required by law to be listed separately on your receipt (same goes for taxes - both sales and corporate) so people know exactly how much of their money is going to what. A well-informed customer is a prerequisite for a thriving market, just as a well-informed voter is a prerequisite for a thriving democracy. All this out of sight, out of mind hanky-panky should be illegal.

Instead, MC/Visa got laws passed doing the reverse. It's illegal to charge a customer a surcharge for using a credit card, but legal to give a cash discount. They're mathematically the same thing, only there's no direct link between the amount of the cash discount being the amount of the credit card fee. And politicians regularly hide tax increases by levying corporate taxes, where the tax is eventually paid for by the voter but hidden in the price of the goods we buy.

At least there might finally be some sanity starting to settle onto these fees. There's a movement among merchants to cap the amount of the credit card fee to a few dollars per transaction. Right now it's typically a minimum (like 25 cents) + 1% to 2% of the transaction. This is not bad when someone buys a $5 bag of candy. But at a hotel I used to work at, conference customers would regularly charge their $10k-$50k conference bill to a credit card. If a customer put their $50k bill on their Amex card, Amex gets $1000 of that $50k. $1000 for a single electronic funds transfer! And you thought a $20 wire transfer fee was bad. And they're not even on the hook if it turned out the card was stolen. Amex would just reverse the charges and the hotel would be out the money. It's insane.

Parent

"If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that's been on shelves for more than five minutes, I'll give you 1,200 bucks for it." -- SCEA President Jack Tretton