Mobile Wallet Media is a news media, analyst, marketing and consulting firm focused on the future of mobile: payments, marketing, loyalty commerce, security, prepaid, virtual currency, daily deals and the convergence of them all with social and local. The Chief Editor, Randy Smith, was the primary founder, inventor and former CEO of MobilePayUSA, a TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley Winner.
And last but not least PayPal is a looming giant on the verge of reinventing itself. Last year they partnered with Discover to ride it's rails and issue it own cards.
John Salyer, of PayPal stated "The most significant thing we did is to partner with Discover. It locks us into the ecosystem. We are establishing a baseline for ubiquity. We are still saying we don't have it all figured out and are open to talking with anybody in the space." Just last week PayPal announced a partnership with Mercury and just yesterday announced a partnership with Micros, which leads me to believe they are heading down the road akin to LevelUp.
However it appears PayPal has not yet fully leveraged their partnership with Discover for use with mobile payments. If they only simply adopted my invention I revealed a couple months back using an open-loop payment card to initiate (spoofing, not using actual payment card) mobile payment transactions in the cloud, PayPal and Discover could be a Dynamic Duo that would be hard to beat. It would enable speed of deployment and cost savings for integration unparalled in mobile payments to date. Of course there is much more to success in mobile payments. It takes the merging loyalty, gift, social, security, coupons, offers all into a nice convenient and simple to use app.
PayPal has potential to really crush much of the competition in the mobile payments space if they can develop a roadmap using a "Mobile payments Card" and through partnering with the top tier POS systems. They have also aligned with 50 of the top acquirers in the nation. If PayPal adopts LevelUp's playbook and adds mobile gifting via social media, look out. But like Apple today, without Steve Jobs, can they still execute in deploying new innovation?
The 'Disruptive Innovation Meteor' named MOBILE has struck the world's of retail payments, banking and marketing. Firms wanting to survive, compete and win in this new environment must adapt by embracing disruptive innovation or risk becoming irrelevant or extinct. Read story