QR Payments Loosing Ground
I am a fan of QR payments. Not because there is anything special about the technology, but because it returned competition to the payment market.
QR payments wrestled the true meaning of the word “open” from the so-called “open-loop” systems, which are as open to new players as the Berlin Wall was to the citizens of East Germany.
Unfortunately, some of the main beneficiaries of the new market have grown complacent and seem to think that their success has made them invulnerable to the old, card-based systems fighting back. GCash, the largest consumer-side player in the e-wallet market in the Philippines, is an unfortunate case in point (also see my post on the GCash user experience).
GCash, Nice to have known you
For a while I have observed a strange fraying of the edges of the GCASH business which still commands a large market share in e-wallet accounts.
For a long time there was no stoping the success of GCash. The name became synonymous with QR Payments, and even today most people will ask for Gcash payment even so they are using QRPh.
However, Gcash seems to be loosing ground. I outlined the reasons for this decline more generally in another post.
But there is also the lack of focus on the strength of QR payments in the GCash user experience, which is the topic of this post.