Two major mobile payment services are coming to the USA in 2014: one from a Joint Venture of huge retailers: the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), and the other from Apple Inc.

MCX 

MCX, who probably needed to get their announcement out before Apple announced their service next week, is a joint venture of major retailers including Wal-Mart, Target, Wendy’s and Dunkin Donuts, said that their service (called CurrentC) would allow customers to pay for purchases at more than 110,000 U.S. retail locations via their mobile devices. Consumers will be able to access the entire CurrentC network by using the CurrentC app, or through merchant apps that utilize CurrentC functionality. In addition to payments, CurrentC will offer merchant loyalty programs and coupons.

MCX has already been running private pilots throughout the U.S., which it plans to expand over the next few months. Regional and national rollouts will commence in 2015. Some experts are predicting it will launch before the 2014 holiday season.

CurrentC boasts a secure payment experience by storing financial information in the cloud, rather than on the mobile device. The app also uses a token placeholder to facilitate transactions instead of constantly passing the data between the user, merchant and financial institution, MCX said.

MCX is adamant that CurrentC will offer merchants the one thing that many mobile wallets have not—the ability to enhance the customer experience. “It will offer merchants new and exciting channels to engage with customers, strengthen relationships, and enjoy more control of transaction data,” said MCX CEO Dekkers Davison. 

Apple’s mobile payment initiative

Although the formal announcement from Apple on the new iPhone 6 and their new mobile payment initiative is due next week, on 9th September, many key details are already ‘known’, have been ‘leaked’:

• Apple will be partnering with Amex, MasterCard and VISA to provide the service
• the transactions on the iPhone will be ‘card present’ transactions as the iPhone user (for models 5s and all variations of iPhone 6) will have been uniquely identified by their fingerprint
• the new iPone 6 will use Near Field Communication (NFC)
• the payment service will use the Passbook App as part of the payment service and so be support merchant loyalty scheme vouchers.

The new Apple technology will be impressive, and so are the numbers: Apple has over 800 million registered cards on their database while MasterCard has under 200 million, Visa just over 400, and UnionPay just over 400 million.

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CTMfile take: The scale of these mobile payment initiatives - these are some of the large retailers anywhere, and Apple has more registered payment cards than Visa, MasterCard and UnionPay combined - is such that, over the next couple of years, payment at the POS in the USA will change significantly. For retailers in the USA, the question is “Are you ready for mobile.” This really will be disruptive technology.