CurrentC and social adoption processes
In October last year I wrote an article about CurrentC, the initiative involving Walmart and other big retailers (Rite Aid, CVS, Kmart, Sears, Target, 7 Eleven, or Best Buy, among others) to try to counter the launch of Apple Pay.
The idea was simple: to deny Apple Pay access to some of the biggest retailers in the US, who had to sign a contract agreeing to block their NFC tills, making it impossible for their customers to use not just Apple Pay, but other systems such as Google Wallet or simple NFC cards, turned into the equivalent of collateral damage.
The retailers were opposed to Apple Pay for a number of reasons: they were trying to set up an alternative system to compete with Apple; and above all, that gave them access to customer information, which Apple zealously protects. Using Apple Pay generates a different number to the credit card, encodes the transaction, and doesn’t incorporate stores’ own loyalty systems.
But aside from wanting to access their customers’ valuable information, there was a bigger incentive: while Apple Pay respected the credit cards’ commissions as part of the price of winning their support and thus ensuring mass take up, the consortium behind CurrentC wanted to eliminate them, creating a system that didn’t use credit cards, but directly debited the payment from customers’ bank accounts. It sounds like a good idea, if it weren’t for the fact that these chains have shown that they are simply not capable of coming up with systems that benefit customers…
Three days ago, one of CurrentC’s main partners, Rite Aid, announced that it would soon be accepting Apple Pay in its stores, a move that other members of the consortium also seem to be seriously considering, and that can be done simply by turning their NFC cash registers back on. At the same time, the consortium has said that its system, which initially seemed to be based on the use of QR codes, but that was open to other technologies, will not be launched until next year.
The simple truth here is that it is more or less a waste of time trying to beat Apple when it comes to getting people to adopt new things. Blocking NFC systems was a pointless exercise: it’s possible that a few people might have changed their habits so as to use a different convenience store — that’s why they’re called “convenience” stores — but this was rightly interpreted by most customers as a hostile move. If you want to develop your own alternative in an environment where many have already tried and failed, then you need to be very well prepared: simply announcing something based on outdated technology and that is no longer available isn’t going to get you anywhere, even if you’re Walmart. The important aspect of innovation is that most of the time it’s not just about technology, but understanding why and how people decide to adopt this or that product or service.
(En español, aquí)
