Visa to devs: Please take contents of our wallet
Make shopping fun like first-person-shooters to repel PayPal, Google
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Buying stuff online should be so fast and fun that it resembles the experience offered by first-person shooters, in which as soon as one acquires a tool it is possible to start using it.
That's the professional opinion of Greg Storey, head of Visa's V.me service for Asia-Pacific, Central Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Speaking in Sydney at the GeoNext conference, Storey said online shopping is mostly broken, as credit card payments take too long and are too complicated. That's good news for PayPal and has meant the likes of Google and Amazon have entered the payments industry. Visa thinks most such efforts can be dismissed.
PayPal, Storey said, has “laid a path for us to follow” and Visa will do so happily, knowing that it will not only satisfy consumers but put price pressure on its rival.
Google, he said, doesn't have the hard core banking background to make it as safe, in reality or punters' perceptions, as banks and those like Visa who have worked with banks for long periods of time.
“Google will be disruptive and that will be fun to you,” Storey said, “but they don't care about making money from payment. They just want to do a better job of winning consumer focus” and therefore serving more ads.
Visa's response is a platform called V.me, that it is hoped will eventually offer payments, loyalty schemes, rewards, coupons, comparison shopping, financial management and more, all delivered to the point of sale or mobile device.
The hope relies on developers, a group Storey said Visa has never previously courted, but will now do so vigorously so that vendors of e-commerce software tool up to bake V.me into their products. While Visa itself will of course be nourished by any success it enjoys, Storey thinks consumers will also enjoy the change, as he said a “very dated and simplistic approach was taken” towards the design of today's online payment system, resulting in most requiring six steps and over forty data fields to make a payment. Storey hopes to reduce that to two steps and four fields. If only fragging the average level boss was so easy. ®
COMMENTS
Er, it's complex because the damned CC companies made it so!
Do the PR bunnies who write this sort of thing actually use the products they're writing about?
Fact is, using a CC online was made HUGELY more of a pain when Verified By Visa and the Access equivalent came into being.
Do those parts of the banking system that foisted that horror upon us know what those propounding this simplified system are doing?
I have to admit I am struggling here
The other day I bought some replacement bed linen from an online store. The process was painless and the stuff arrived in days.
I fail to understand how biying bed linen in a manner which can be likened to a first person shooter experience can be an improvement.
Would I have to enter the on-line store, hit the deck when another shopper movedsilently by, creep to the bottom of the stairs, find some power ups, shoot the floor assistant in the head, nick his BFG-9000, crab up the stairs, fling a fragmentation grenade towards the Customer Services desk (never a bad option, to be honest) before moving to the haberdshey department and fight off zombies with a chainshow whilst I decided between blue gingham or a Laura Ashley flock?
Re: Agree
I don't have a problem with most of the small vendors I use, it's the ones that use that crap verified by Visa or the clone that Mastercard uses where you get sent to another site and enter another password to pretend it's more secure if you have to fart around to do anything, that pisses me off. Most often I go to another vendor to avoid it.
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