Last week, it was disclosed that Apple’s iOS 8 would allow consumers to scan their credit cards for mobile payments. The announcement barely registered on the banking industry’s radar, especially with all the iPhone 6 hubbub. It should have. This is just one more in a series of developments that put banks at risk of getting a bad taste of their own medicine, and that medicine would be fees. When you take into account the array of technology companies, you realize that banks are increasingly going to find well-armed intermediaries preventing the unencumbered access to their customers and protective customers. Back in the 1990s, the talk in media was about “owning the pipe.” The theory went back then – and has been supported through the years — that content producers wouldn’t matter because whichever company “owns the pipe,” meaning controlling the entity that delivers the content, would control the majority of media economics. Cable companies were considered owners of the pipes, and to this day companies like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision continue to leverage their control of distribution and grow. Technology companies are increasingly “owning the pipes” of customer access. Twitter, Facebook/WhatsApp, Apple, Google — these companies are increasingly […]
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