• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, December 16, 2014

The mobile payments picture continues to evolve with an increasing number of options becoming available, not always from expected sources.

Mobile startups like Square and the well-established PayPal have been disrupting the traditional payment landscape for some time.

Then along came Apple Pay, finally adopting NFC (near field communication), so anyone with an iPhone 6 could use their phone to quickly pay in the places that accept that form of payment.

Around the corner is the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), the monster retailer consortium of brands including Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Dunkin’ Donuts, Gap and Publix, among others.

So the technological hurdles of figuring out how to use a phone to pay is beyond well underway.

But the issue of how a mobile consumer pays may become less significant than who is collecting the money and what else is linked into the payment process.

A new study found that most consumers are not satisfied with the strength of credit card and personal information among retailers.

However, most (72%) trust their banks or credit unions, based on the survey of 6,000 online consumers conducted by Bizrate Insights.

“Those of us who have been operating in the mobile payments space know that payments is not the whole game,” Pat McGrory, president of emerging offerings at Amdocs, told me. Amdocs is a $4 billion company that does a lot of the behind-the-scenes transaction processing for companies including AT&T, DirectTV and Comcast.

The company today announced a major effort targeting unbanked and under-banked markets around the world. That market comprises about 2.5 billion people who don’t bank, though 1.7 billion of them have a phone.

There are multiple challenges for mobile payments acceptance outside the U.S.

“Adoption still has a lot of inhibitors,” says McGrory. “One of those is financial literacy. Then there’s the eco-system, incentives to merchants and incentives to consumers. There are many, many things that are inhibiting adoption of mobile financial services.”

And that strikes me as the key, no matter the location. The focus here is on providing financial services, not mobile payments.

This reminds me of a comment made recently while I was visiting the advance labs of Paydiant, the platform company powering the MCX venture. Co-founder Chris Gardner mentioned that payments was the least interesting part of what they do, suggesting that the real value is in advance of the actual transaction, such as with the integration of loyalty points, rewards and coupons.

In the case of Amdocs, its mobile wallet that I saw includes capabilities for money transfer to each other, instant loans, shopping features and, yes, payments. But the payments part is not the big deal; it’s everything else that’s integrated with it.

Unlike Apple Pay and Softcard, the joint venture of Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, both of which use NFC for payments, Amdocs uses a code on the phone screen, similar to the MCX/Paydiant approach.

The companies that would use the mobile wallet approach of Amdocs would likely be the large phone carriers or banks, so we’ll be watching that space.

There will be numerous mobile payment choices for consumers and the ultimate market outcome is still in the distance.

One of the issues to be resolved will be how many consumers gravitate to simple, mobile payments, essentially just a cash or credit card transaction replacement, and how many await the total mobile wallet.

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