The following is a guest contributed post by Lisa Paccione, Vice President, Americas Sales, Syniverse 

Although mobile wallet has been available on smartphones for several years for payments, it has been an underutilized asset to complement apps and other mobile communication channels in order to enable marketers to better engage with customers and boost loyalty.

While some brands have started integrating mobile wallet, most still haven’t realized the full opportunity for engagement. Mobile wallet awareness is now reaching a point where marketers can no longer afford to not fully embrace it. With this in mind, Syniverse recently completed a mobile wallet study that offers insights for marketers seeking to take greater advantage of this channel. We’ll explore some of the key findings from the study before diving into strategies for getting started with mobile wallet.

New Findings and New Directions for Mobile Wallet Use

In a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers and 1,000 U.K. consumers, we identified three critical findings:

• Nearly two thirds of respondents said they are aware of mobile wallet, and it’s available on 90 percent of smartphones today.
• Of those that have a mobile wallet in the U.S., 53 percent use it at least once a week and as many as 29 percent use it daily.
• More than half of those in the U.S. that initially did not know about mobile wallets are interested in using them.

In addition to this study, a 2017 Mobile Consumer Report shows that nearly 40 percent of smartphone users surveyed in the U.K. and U.S. currently use the non-payment portion of a mobile wallet to store information – such as offers, coupons and airline boarding passes. This promising insight is explored further in the report showing that nearly 70 percent of those surveyed believe mobile wallet offers from a brand would positively impact their view of the brand and would encourage them to make a purchase.

These findings provide important data for marketers. There is a clear market opportunity for adopting mobile wallet solutions. Based on our findings, however, one of the first steps is for brands to create awareness of wallet and educate consumers by enticing them to take advantage of mobile wallet’s benefits. Mobile wallet will offer an increasingly valuable engagement channel for those brands that create compelling strategies.

Three Strategies to Get Started

Based on this survey data and lessons learned from recent customer engagements, here are three strategies that I’ve found to be crucial for enlightening consumers about mobile wallet and getting a wallet campaign off the ground:

• Use geolocation-based offers – Using geolocation to determine when a person is near a store and reaching them with a coupon, reward, or other mobile wallet item at the “mobile moment,” when they are most likely to be making a purchasing decision, is critical. This precisely timed outreach enables brands to influence customers to act on a particular purchase as well as encourage them to shop more.
• Integrate with loyalty programs – Mobile wallet offers a particularly complementary fit with loyalty programs. Customers can immediately earn and redeem points without having to search for their physical loyalty cards or dig through their apps for information. Developing a loyalty program that integrates mobile wallet items offers a unique benefit that can spur customers to use loyalty programs more heavily and thereby shop and increase purchases.
• Bridging instore and digital – Offering mobile experiences along the customer’s instore journey through wallet can help brands boost revenue, increase efficiencies and remain agile. As one example, Chipotle Mexican Grill recently launched a mobile wallet campaign when it closed all its locations for a company-wide meeting. For customers who visited a store that was closed, Chipotle offered those customers a free burrito, redeemable through a mobile wallet coupon. The restaurant set up window signs urging customers to text a number to receive a coupon, and the response rate was unprecedented, with about 5.3 million people requesting the offer, and 3.5 million people redeeming it.

In these ways, mobile wallet offers a powerful but still underutilized engagement channel to dynamically connect with customers. The first step is to entice consumers to try mobile wallet and educate them that wallet is much more than a payment method. These three strategies here can help brands take the first steps.

The post New Data Unveils Strategies to Help You Get Started with Mobile Wallet appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Mary Clark, Chief Marketing Officer at Syniverse.

With 2016 coming to a close, many marketers are busy completing their plans for the new year. But today’s mobile marketing landscape has become more competitive and multifaceted than ever, causing many marketing plans to become moving targets.

To break through the noise, engage customers and reduce friction in their path to purchase, marketers are having to compete against a dizzying assortment of mobile channels vying for attention. Fortunately, a new channel has emerged to help.

A Highly Versatile Space

Mobile wallet is a channel that offers a fresh and underappreciated approach to engaging customers. This versatile tool offers a one-of-a-kind capability to seamlessly deliver coupons, rewards, tickets and payment options straight to a customer’s phone, at a place on the phone where they can easily be used. In fact, the name “mobile wallet” is somewhat of a misnomer since this tool is actually a highly versatile space that provides an open-ended publishing stream into a customer’s phone through a native application.

Mobile wallet can be leveraged for mobile marketing in a number of ways, and this flexibility and ease of use offer new levels of engagement between brands and customers. In return for customers adding a brand’s offering to their mobile wallet, brands can gain an invaluable connection for strengthening their marketing investment and leveraging this investment for deeper customer engagement and maximized ROI on overall marketing.

As the mobile marketing landscape continues to grow more cluttered and competitive, mobile wallet will offer an increasingly valuable tool that brands must take advantage of to more dynamically engage their customers.

Breaking Down the Benefits

Building the case for the use of mobile wallet is an impressive array of benefits. Let’s look at each.

• Attribution and hypertargeting – Mobile wallet offers a new level of results measurement by enabling deep visibility into customers’ preferences and patterns. Mobile wallet campaigns can be targeted to certain customer segments, set to only be operative in specific locations, programmed so they can be instantly updated, and tracked through barcodes, allowing marketers to better measure the effectiveness of campaigns. As an example, to increase in-store traffic to Chipotle restaurants, mobile marketing specialist Vibes helped the company push out a special quiz to millions of customers that offered them several personalized mobile wallet offers in return for participating in the quiz. In the end, Chipotle achieved a 20 percent mobile-wallet-offer redemption rate over the campaign’s five-week run time.
• Ease of access – As its name implies, mobile wallet integrates all coupons, passes and payment services in one “wallet” that is already pre-installed as a native app on nearly every Android and Apple smart device. Users can quickly and uniformly retrieve these items here, rather than have to go to separate apps requiring different passwords and forms of access. And, of course, mobile wallet’s payment function allows users to greatly quicken their purchasing by simply tapping their phone and swiping it across a screen, instead of having to insert and remove a plastic card in a reader.
• Real-time automatic updating – Adding to the convenience of mobile wallet’s ease of access is its automatic updating capability. Brands can seamlessly update individual users’ mobile wallet items without requiring any steps on users’ end. Even better, those updates can be automatically pushed to the device’s lock screen for immediate viewing and easy access.
• Versatile delivery and activation – When a brand’s offering is added to a customer’s mobile wallet, brands can gain an invaluable connection for strengthening their marketing investment and leveraging this investment for deeper customer engagement and maximized ROI on overall marketing. A critical component of this is the versatile number of ways that mobile wallet items can be delivered to and used or “activated” by customers. For example, a special coupon for a free beverage at a coffee bar can be delivered to a mobile wallet via text message, email, ad, app, website, social media, in-store promotion and even direct mail. In this way, brands can take advantage of a multitude of channels to drive awareness for a campaign, and customers can easily activate the offer from whichever channel they discover and prefer.
• Complement to apps – And in addition to all those channels being able to activate mobile wallet, there is another critical advantage in play. As a native application prebuilt on a phone rather than a downloaded app, mobile wallet complements apps by enabling a quick-touch experience compared with the more in-depth experience of apps. In this way, the user is able to take advantage of the best of mobile wallet’s functionality and the best of an app’s services. Moreover, mobile wallet and mobile apps can play off one another, where the mobile app can be used to deliver offers to be saved to wallet, and where the mobile wallet can be used to promote app adoption through direct links to the app store.
• Loyalty rewards – A particular area of marketing for which mobile wallet offers a tremendous opportunity is in spurring the use of mobile loyalty programs. Using mobile wallet, brands can take advantage of a new channel to engage with their most loyal customers and customers can benefit from a new channel that allows them to seamlessly earn loyalty points, check their loyalty status, and redeem rewards without having to deal with extra cards.

In many ways, these benefits are only the beginning, as mobile wallet becomes more fully utilized and gains in popularity with consumers. To maintain competitive advantage, brands must develop a strategy for integrating mobile wallet in their marketing programs and more powerfully engaging their customers.

The post Mobile Wallet Offers New Chapter in Customer Engagement appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In the U.S., mobile wallet options include Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Samsung Pay, and branded apps like Starbucks, Walmart Pay, and CVS Pay.

“This year, 38.4 million Americans 14 and over will have used their mobile phones to pay at the point of sale at least once in the preceding six months,” according to eMarketer. “That’s just 19.4 percent of U.S. smartphone users. By 2020, that figure will grow to 33.1 percent of smartphone users.”

What’s the hold up?

“There are several reasons why U.S. consumers aren’t yet making proximity payments en masse,” notes eMarketer analyst Bryan Yeager. “There are still concerns about security, a patchwork of merchant acceptance, and a lack of perceived value in replacing the use of cash or card with the tap or scan of a smartphone.”

Yeager anticipates that those consumer concerns will be addressed in the coming next few years. As a result, mobile pay could surge.

In 2016, proximity mobile payment transactions will grow 183.3 percent to $27.67 billion. Next year, the total could reach $62.49 billion. By 2020, proximity mobile payment transactions are expected to equal $314.13 billion.

“More than 90 percent of U.S. retail sales ($4.45 trillion) will occur in traditional contexts like brick-and-mortar stores this year, which is where consumers primarily make proximity payments,” said Yeager. “Increasing acceptance of proximity payments at a wider array of merchants is pushing average spend via such methods higher, which helps explain why transaction value is growing far faster than the number of users.”

In the meantime, mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) payment apps — think Venmo and Square Cash — have been more widely adopted by consumers. The data shows that 45.8 million adults (about 25 percent of U.S. adult smartphone users) will use a P2P payment app at least once per month.

The post In U.S., Mobile Peer-to-Peer Payment Grows, While Mobile Wallet Action Slower appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That’s the new projection from Juniper Research shared with MMW this week.

Juniper’s report – Mobile Wallets: Strategies for Developed and Developing Markets 2014-2019 – found that growth would be driven by two distinct wallet models.

In emerging/developing markets, SVAs (Stored Value Accounts) are increasingly enabling first time financial access for unbanked individuals, and the report anticipated a surge in deployments across sub-Saharan Africa, developing Asia and Latin America.

“Meanwhile,” Juniper says, “that wallet launches across North America and Western Europe are increasingly expected to feature contactless payment functionality. The sector is forecast to receive a boost both from the anticipated launch of an Apple iWallet later this year and through HCE (Host Card Emulation)-based NFC (Near Field Communications) services.”

The projections note that more than 1 in 3 mobile wallets – and over 50% of wallets in developed markets – will featuring contactless payment within four more years.

The post Juniper: Mobile Wallets in 1 in 5 Handsets by 2018 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The report indicates that even though NFC mobile wallet technology is relatively new, consumer confidence is providing a backbone for market growth for the next 48 months.

The key vendors expected to drive growth during this period are Visa Inc., MasterCard, American Express Inc., PayPal Inc., Google, ISIS, and Square Inc.

“These vendors have pushed to improve security mechanisms for mobile wallets in response to security threats and privacy concerns that have inhibited widespread adoption of mobile wallets,” a report summary reads. “Some security measures that have been adopted are validation through personal documents such as driver’s licenses, passports and social security numbers. Mobile wallet facilities can also be integrated with authentication programs to enhance security and increase users’ confidence in the model.”

Consumer demand for convenient, easy modes of payment, which don’t require the intervention of traditional banking channels is also driving the market.

Additionally, increased penetration of smartphones and demand for high-end mobile devices, especially in the APAC region, as well as growing acceptance of NFC technology among both consumers and businesses is also driving the market.

The post Consumer Confidence Driving Mobile Wallet Market appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The organization simultaneously released an enterprise-class API and three SDKs to further help companies build relationships with connected consumers.

Fosbury enables brands to easily create beautifully designed, large-scale Passbook and Samsung Wallet campaigns in minutes, distribute them to all relevant platforms including Facebook, Twitter, e-newsletters and websites, and manage their performance through a robust, real-time analytics dashboard.

“Mobile is at a tipping point and consumers are starting to embrace the efficiency and convenience of having a digital wallet at their fingertips,” says Lucas Tieleman, CEO and co-founder of Fosbury.

“Brands are looking beyond apps to reach customers and expand their loyalty, and digital wallets give them the opportunity to engage with their customers both on and offline on the one device that’s never far from their reach,” he adds. “The release of our API combined with support for Android® means it is now easier than ever for brands to integrate with digital mobile wallets, increase relevancy and drive higher engagement from loyal customers who want access to all of their passes, coupons, tickets and loyalty cards in one place.”

To learn more about Fosbury and its aims, check out the company’s official webpage here.

The post Fosbury Launches Support for Samsung Wallet appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

As MMW previously reported, Isis Mobile Wallet is poised for national roll-out before year’s end.

The new co-branded account will be offered in every Isis Mobile Wallet as a part of the launch.

According to the mobile payments partners, this arrangement will enable millions of Americans to tap and pay using their American Express Serve account.

By adding American Express Serve to the Wallet, customers will be able to pay bills online and send money to friends and family. They will also be able to add cash to their American Express Serve account or fund it using an existing bank account, any credit or debit card or through direct deposit.

“Linking the platforms will allow millions of people to conveniently and inexpensively manage and move their money,” says Dan Schulman, group president of Enterprise Growth at American Express. “From the palm of your hand, consumers including those without access to traditional bank accounts or credit can have access to everyday financial services. And our combined solution works in today’s retail environment, and in the emerging ‘tap to pay’ point of sale ecosystem.”

The post American Express Serve and Isis Connect Platforms appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Despite the presence of more than 10 payment apps that have gained the attention of mobile users in the U.S., both consumers and merchants are still slow to adopt mobile wallets.

The findings are presented in Yankee Group’s latest report, “Mobile Wallets for the Masses,” which examines the mobile wallet ecosystem and explores why consumers and merchants are not adopting mobile wallets.

The report also outlines seven recommended actions wallet vendors should take to win over consumers and ecosystem partners.

Highlights from the report include:

• More than three-quarters of consumers are interested in NFC. Merchants and brands moved quickly to adopt QR codes for reaching mobile users—their low cost and broad accessibility has led to their ubiquity in on-premise marketing and point-of-sale merchandising both in the U.S. and overseas. NFC tags are picking up momentum after a slower start.

• Wallet vendors should personalize offers and rewards. Mobile engagement requires merchants to adopt a user-first approach. That means serving promotions and incentives to the right customers at the right time. Mobile offers modeled on desktop-based coupon services simply do not work in the smartphone context. Mobile wallet vendors should investigate solutions that have invested in building a precise profile of users.

“While consumers and merchants remain intrigued by mobile wallets, no single solution has emerged victorious,” says Principal Analyst Jason Armitage, who co-authored the report. “As a result, the market is characterized by a multitude of mobile wallet vendors vying for dominance, with a dizzying number of available offerings. As the market matures, solutions that deliver actual value for consumers and merchants will proliferate and clear winners and losers will become more apparent.”

The post Yankee Group Highlights ‘Secrets to Mobile Wallet Success’ appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

According to the company, the number of banks behind the platform has doubled since last fall.

Visa also confirmed this week that more than 250 merchants are on board with the V.me service today.

“So there is a lot more coming here, there is a fairly significant pipeline of merchants,” explains Visa CEO Charles Scharf.

Visa’s V.me is markedly progressing in a highly-competitive marketplace. In fact, Visa’s success is particularly noteworthy when you consider the well-established presence of such heavyweights as Square, PayPal, Google, and others.

“Successful tokenization initiatives must also be interoperable and standardized and do several very important things. Number one is they need to deliver value to all stakeholders, that includes issuers, consumers, merchants, acquirers, payment gateways, and everyone involved in the digital commerce platform,” Scharf said during Visa’s recent earnings call.

“It’s got to be standards based, technology agnostic such that a tokenization solution builds on the existing open nature of the payments industry while also aligning with emerging payment innovation systems mobile and digital wallets,” he concluded. “As I said before, it needs to deliver at least the same level as transparency and reliability that exists today. And equally important it needs to address the needs of everyone globally, not just in the United States.”

The post Visa Highlights Growth of V.me Digital Wallet appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

There were NFC mobile wallet services commercially live in 13 countries worldwide at the end of Q1-2013, the report notes, which is up from just 6 countries at the end of 2011.

However, these services are still available to a very small number of consumers, Berg explains.

“With the exception of a few projects in Asia-Pacific, there are only three NFC mobile wallet services in the world that have an effective addressable market of more than 100,000 people. These three services are Google Wallet and Isis in the US and Turkcell Wallet in Turkey,” explains Lars Kurkinen, telecom analyst at Berg Insight.

This will change substantially during the next few years due to the massive rollouts of NFC-enabled phones, NFC-ready POS terminals and TSM solutions.

“The market for NFC-enabled mobile phones reached a breakthrough in late 2011 and accelerated further in 2012 as new NFC handsets were introduced by all leading handset vendors except Apple,” reads the report from Berg Insight.

Total NFC handset sales grew 300 percent to 140 million units worldwide in 2012.

The global installed base of NFC-enabled handsets reached 170 million units in 2012, which corresponds to approximately 3.3 percent of all mobile handsets in use. Between 2012 and 2017, the installed base of NFC-enabled handsets is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 65 percent to reach 2.1 billion units at the end of the forecast period.

The post The Infrastructure for NFC is Finally Developing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.