Future of Mobile Payments and Integrated Commerce
I love how my go-to fast food chain reads my mind. OK, I love how its mobile app reads my mind. If you’re in the vicinity, it will just pop up your last order with an app notification on your phone.
And, confession time: I always get a fully loaded burrito with extra hot sauce. Always.
It’s as if the app says ‘OK, let’s just acknowledge that together and we can make this really easy for you.’ It doesn’t confront me with 2,000 combinations of a burrito or hundreds of taco combinations I’ve never tried before. I can pay immediately with my stored payment information, skip the line and walk around to pick it up. Wonderful.
That experience is just one example of how the world of commerce is evolving. The old order was divided: You either bought something in a store, you searched around on your desktop and paid at a website, or you had a more purely mobile-only experience with, say, Uber. Now, those boundaries are blurring. And increasingly, mobile wallets play a key role in streamlining online purchases and enabling powerful, personalized, shopping experiences for consumers wherever they happen to be.
For the consumer, that brings a range of benefits that makes paying for things faster and easier, with greater peace of mind. You can order ahead, pay and pick up at a favorite lunch spot, or set it and forget it with subscriptions to music or video streaming services. But it also brings an ever-faster flow of transactions to stay on top of.
At Capital One, we’re focused on providing straightforward, intuitive products and tools that help our customers manage their accounts and their financial lives with confidence in this new anytime and anywhere world. Our goal is not only to reduce friction to make things easier, but to enable our customers to be smarter buyers of things. We see our role as expanding beyond that narrow strip of plastic that delivers fantastic rewards and terrific customer service but stops there.
Capital One Wallet, for example, adds a new dimension to mobile payments that fits with our vision of being a champion of the consumer.
With Wallet, customers have a safe, seamless and easy way to use their credit or debit cards directly from their phone to pay for purchases at favorite stores.
And as a mobile app designed to help customers stay on top of their spending and get the most from their credit card rewards, it delivers a simple way to manage rewards at a glance, get real-time spending alerts to know when your card is being charged, and see detailed purchase information that lets you drill down on specific transactions to get real time details on exactly where money is being spent.
Our customers love this kind of assurance. It gets to the deep-seated fear we all have that somebody is charging us without our knowledge for something we don’t want.
As banks, this is where we have to expand the role we play for customers. Customers have entrusted us with their data. They share with us everything they buy; from the daily cup of coffee to the big screen TV to the subscription for movie streaming. We have an opportunity to make management of these transactions easier, allowing every customer to be perfectly connected to where their hard earned money is going. We can deliver this information in real-time, with the controls to take action whenever anything is not right.
It’s that kind of personalization customers are seeking to make the world of payments simpler and frictionless. For Capital One, that’s really the goal: To have a bank fit into your life, not the other way around. After all, if ordering your favorite burrito bowl is as easy as a click of a button, your bank should be able to take the stress and concerns out of something with a little more value: your money.
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