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.
Quo Vadis, Risk Management
Payment professionals seem to have this idea that they are the knight in shining armor who is standing between the clueless and childlike customer and the omnipotent criminal. In their pursuit of safety for everybody, they seem to be willing to sacrifice privacy, self-determination and individual responsibility one small step at a time.
I say that customers are perfectly capable and willing to take responsibility for their actions, and they should bear the consequences of their actions instead of hiding behind the bogeyman of the criminal who, in the imagination of the risk managers, keeps getting ever more sophisticated and smarter every year. By now, all these online criminals must be geniuses that would make Prof Moriarty look like an amateur.
MannyPay - Manny Open Questions
Competition is good, and any open and interoperable payment system should make it easy for new players, small and big, to join. In this spirit, I am happy that another e-wallet has entered the market: MannyPay.
To satisfy my curiosity, I downloaded the app on my iPhone and tried to enroll. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get past a nonsensical error message, and the app froze on the screen where you are supposed to enter a passcode from a text message (which also never arrived).
Nevertheless, I have some initial comments, and I will update this post when they have fixed their teething issues.
