Merchant mobile product analysis tool
click below to learn more about mobile commerce
Introduction
- The mobile commerce environment is a rapidly changing landscape. As you continue to assess products that are at - or are coming to - market, it is critical to step back and analyze the many ways in which mobile product acceptance can impact your business. Payments partners and product providers can significantly benefit from insight into how you are thinking about mobile commerce deployments, and working more constructively together will help us all build better and more customer-friendly products. This mobile commerce analysis tool is intended to spark some high level thoughts and discussions regarding product creation, acceptance, and deployment by different stakeholders in the payments chain.
1. Customer Experience
- Is there a pain point for the merchant or customer that this product is trying to solve? What is it?
- Do the participation numbers & demographics associated with the wallet/product align with your customer base?
- What might device payment plans (i.e. financing models) do to impact user demographics?
- What customer adoption and usage numbers are being released publicly by product providers, as well as third parties?
- What challenges should the merchant anticipate with the wallet/product? Where and why have other merchant acceptors had customer adoption issues?
- What are the various channels (i.e. in-store, online, in-App) through which the customer can access the wallet/product?
- What is the customer experience with the product? What capacity do various stakeholders have to influence that customer experience through customizing the various acceptance platforms available with the wallet/product?
- What does the customer interface look like? What is the customer experience with the interface?
- What opportunities does the product provide for ongoing engagement with my customer? (i.e. rewards platforms)
- What is the experience for international consumers?
2. Product Basics
- Is there a company website/landing page or other public-facing summary of the product?
- What does the product provider’s SEC 10K say specifically about the growth plan for the product and company, including potential technology partnerships down the road, and risk factors associated with the product and company?
- What features does the product have that map against individual merchant company needs?
- What’s the access point technology? (i.e. NFC, BLE, QR Code, Web, App)
- What security technologies are incorporated into the wallet/product?
- What security technologies/features are not available?
- Which platforms can the wallet be made available in? (i.e. Single App, Multiple Apps, Web-based)
- What operating systems is it available on? ( i.e. iOS, Android)
- What consumer devices/hardware – including wearables – can the solution be deployed on? (i.e. ApplePay is iPhone 6 or higher)
- What payment products are loadable into the wallet/product? (i.e. private label, gift cards)
- What payment products are not loadable into the wallet/product?
- What loyalty platforms can be integrated into the wallet/product, and what retailer development does that integration entail?
- What data analytics are available regarding use of the product, and in what format can they be provided to the retailer?
- What, if any, challenges exist in accessing certain financial products inside the wallet? (i.e. default wallet settings, contactless technology specifications, limited product access through certain wallet customer verification methods such as biometrics)
3. Security
- How does the customer load or provision financial products or accounts (i.e. credit cards, debit cards, checking account, gift cards) into the wallet? Does this vary depending on the environment for which the customer is provisioning the product (i.e. 1st Party App, 3rd party App, Web-based, Digital Wallet)?
- Is there data available on the efficacy of the provisioning process for the wallet/product, and if so, what does that data show? How effective is the provisioning process in ensuring fraudulent accounts are not loaded into the wallet/product?
- What security features does the product include? What are the default acceptance settings, customizable features that can be enabled, and any specific business requirements?
- Where is the cardholder payment information stored inside the wallet/product? (i.e. your server, acquirer server, wallet, phone hardware, cloud, some combination, etc.)
- What cardholder payment account information data is transmitted in a wallet/product transaction? Which payment stakeholders send/receive that data, and what does the transaction flow look like when each stakeholder sends/receives that data?
- How is the cardholder payment information transmitted and stored at different points throughout the transaction, including at rest? (i.e. data is tokenized, encrypted, both, none, etc.)
4. Financial Costs
- What one-time costs and per transaction costs are involved with wallet/product acceptance? (i.e. interchange fees, network fees, security fees, and other processing fees)
- If network-branded (i.e. Visa and MasterCard) card products are loadable into the product/wallet, how will network rules be applied to transactions? Specifically, will transactions be treated as card-preset or card-not-present? The separate classifications have significant cost and liability term differences.
- How will you be able to exercise transaction routing choice/preference on products stored inside the wallet/product?
- What custom programming will you have to undertake in order to manage merchant routing choice on certain products stored inside the wallet/product?
- What are the costs involved in turning on and then managing the product? Will you have to hire internal associates or retain consultants?
- What type of connectivity is necessary to support the product? What costs are associated with outfitting my various acceptance environments with that connectivity? (i.e. connectivity with fuel pumps or drive thru ordering stations)
- What are the publicly reported fraud loss numbers associated with the product?
- How are fraud losses on the wallet/product distributed between different stakeholders involved with acceptance?
- What are the anticipated fraud management costs for all stakeholders associated with wallet/product acceptance?
- If Visa, MasterCard, and other network-branded card products are loadable into the product/wallet, how are chargebacks associated with the wallet/product managed or assessed?
- What, if any, data is available regarding the number of chargebacks associated with the wallet and the percentage of chargeback losses borne by each party involved in the transaction?
5. Data Management
- What is the scope of the data passing through the wallet/product? Does it include cardholder payment information, loyalty information, other purchasing information, etc.?
- What are the business terms surrounding the collection, use, and management of such data? Which data components are in/out of scope of the wallet/product business terms?
- What is the first-party (merchant) visibility into cardholder payment information, loyalty information, and other purchasing information?
- What is the third-party (wallet provider, card network, technology partner, etc.) visibility into cardholder payment information, loyalty information, and other purchasing information?
- Who owns the purchasing information in regard to transactions that take place inside the wallet/product? Does it vary based on the type of information involved in the transaction?
6. Acceptance Terms
- Is there a public-facing webpage that outlines wallet/product merchant acceptance terms or other business terms?
- Which internal departments would need to be involved/engaged with acceptance strategy? (i.e. Finance, Operations, IT, Marketing, etc).
- If network-branded card products are loadable into the wallet/product, how will existing card network rules impact my acceptance for in-store transactions, contactless transactions, online transactions, and any other sales environments?
- Will use of the wallet/product be a licensed product, partnership, or other business scenario?
- Which 3rd party business entities and technology providers are involved with the wallet/product? What is the wallet/product dependency on each of these entities? And, with which entities will the merchant have a direct relationship?
- For individual internal discussion: What impact will acceptance have on pricing in other aspects of my business due to potential volume shifts or other factors?
- For individual internal discussion: What impact will acceptance have on existing or potential contracts with other wallet providers or business partners?
- Based on product availability inside the wallet, as well as capacity of customers to interact with product stored inside the wallet (i.e. initiate a gift card or prepaid fund load), what do we need to do to ensure compliance with existing laws surrounding products (i.e. FSA debit card OTC purchase rules, FinCen BSA & prepaid access laws)?
7. Business Justification
- What customer am I trying to attract/retain with deployment of this wallet/product?
- What costs (i.e. hardware upgrades, software programming, etc.) are associated with wallet/product deployment?
- What is the internal feasibility of different departments to support wallet/product deployment, and provide ongoing support for the wallet/product life cycle?
- What is the anticipated incremental benefit of product acceptance to my business as a whole? How is this quantified?
- What are the anticipated incremental sales created by wallet/product acceptance?
- What type of transactions do I risk cannibalizing, and what potential impact could that have on my business? For example, do I risk reducing private label card transaction based on default wallet settings?
- What ticket lift, if any, is anticipated with wallet/product acceptance?
- Will transactions with the wallet/product cost more, less, or the same as the transactions the wallet/product is likely to shift volume from?
- What feasibility do I have to intelligently influence our customers’ payment choice at the checkout regarding selection of different products/accounts loaded into the wallet?
- What is the perceived value-add of the wallet/product to the customer?
- What is my ability to engage with the customer via positive marketing channels (i.e. loyalty and rewards offerings) at the checkout or point-of-interaction?
- How does wallet/product deployment compare to other priorities in my payments value chain?
- Will wallet/product acceptance likely result in a better, worse, or a similar customer checkout experience compared to other products?
8. Business Integration
- Which transaction environments will we want to deploy the wallet/product in? What challenges are involved with wallet/product deployment for those environments?
- If I can integrate rewards/positive marketing into the wallet/product deployment, what will the rewards integration platform look like, how will it work with existing processes, and how will it look to my customer?
- How will wallet/product deployment be integrated and reconciled with existing back office operations?
- What impact will wallet/product deployment have on any of my other vendor relationships?
- What customization will need to be made in each product/wallet deployment environment?
- How will wallet/product deployment interact with our existing security solutions and platforms? (i.e. existing proprietary or 3rd party tokenization and encryption solutions)
- How will wallet/product deployment impact existing fraud-monitoring procedures? For example, if as a merchant you use the card account number to help predict fraudulent transactions, and that card account number is disintermediated by a token, how does it impact your existing fraud mitigation procedures?
- What is the anticipated speed-to-market/deployment time of the wallet/product for our business?
- What areas do we anticipate wanting to customize for our business, and what impact will those customizations have on speed to market?
- How could the evolution of the wallet/product potentially impact our business? For example, accessing a mobile wallet via a wearable entails a very different customer experience from accessing the wallet via a mobile phone.
- Will my business be able to identify and reconcile transactions made via this wallet/product? Specifically, will the wallet/product provider and its technology partners require the inclusion of wallet and product identifiers in the transaction detail for all purchases made through the wallet/product in every environment we deploy?
- What role, if any, will our company have in managing customer account creation and integration with the wallet/product, especially on private label, closed loop gift cards, and rewards integration?
- Is there a way to work with the customer to set default shopping settings for when a customer utilizes the wallet/product in one of my checkout environments?
9. Rollout
- What type of point-of-sale upgrades will our business need to make to support wallet/product acceptance? How do these upgrades vary across different environments? What is the timeframe for these hardware upgrades and point-of-sale acceptance programming?
- What processor platform changes, if any, need to be made during wallet/product deployment? What is the timeframe for those changes?
- What point-of-sale or point-of-interaction technology will our business have to enable or update, and under what timeframe?
- What information about the wallet/product deployment will we need to distribute both internally and externally, and what will the content of those communications include?
- What information about the deployment will we need to communicate to third-party vendors, and what will the content of those communications include?
- What type of staff training will we need to have before we deploy the product, and what will those training timelines look like prior to product deployment?
- What other items will our business need to consider before deployment (i.e. scheduling, staffing, etc.)?
