Despite everybody's excitement about the opportunity to disintermediate Visa & MC, its funny how they never get any credit for the amount of work and leather soles they have worn thin trying to build the famed 4 party ecosystem as we know it. Think about the pain they had to go through to create a proper acceptance network incl. a properly defined and operational merchant acquiring side of their business, as if the issuing side of the equation wasn't hard enough.
That said, I am sure that in the emerging markets we (ed. you and I) have all reason and opportunity in the world to, on certain types of payments, create perfectly humming 3 party systems. A great example is to create applications and platforms for turning handsets into receiver and sender of credentials and then have settlement occur via stored value platforms or to use MC/Visa speak, prepaid platforms. This would aliminate the larger scale deployment of both an issuing and acquiring side of the ecosystem, and rather create a petite 3 party system.
I am not sure this will ever happen, but I think the model is plausible, yet hard to execute on - if you know the guys or teams that can, you let me know right away.....
No comments:
Post a Comment