Card-Backed QR Payment - Good or Bad?
Two developments in the payment industry in the Philippines are casting a shadow over the future of QR payments as a credible competitor to traditional payment cards.
The first one is GCash announcing (1) that they will allow credit cards to back retail payment transactions if there is not enough money in the GCash account.
The second is the introduction of ApplePay (2).
Why would those two developments be good or bad? The answer is as always: It depends. It is good for the trainload payment card schemes, bad for the e-wallet providers, somewhat neutral for the customer, and disastrous for competition in the payment industry.
In my new article, I will first take some educated guesses how these two products likely work, and then I will discuss why I think that this is not good for a healthy competitive payment industry.