It’s no secret mobile wallets are struggling to find traction. When Barclaycard tapped Paydiant to help develop its mobile payments solutions eighteen months ago, the two companies decided to start small. The start-small approach might be the way to go for new mobile payments solutions in the future. The test market chosen for the solution, eventually called bPay, was Newark, Del., home of the University of Delaware, a public institution with some 19,000 students. Salespeople from Barclaycard canvassed the university area and also the nearby city of Wilmington. “We looked at providing value to Tier 4 merchants,” said Angel Carra, head of mobile relationship and operations management at BarclaycardUS. Visa defines Tier 4 merchants as “Merchants processing less than 20,000 Visa e-commerce transactions annually and all other merchants processing up to 1 million Visa transactions annually.” The focus on small merchants allowed bPay to zero in on concerns over pricing and point-of-sale technology that might not be an issue to much larger partners. bPay, like other Paydiant solutions, uses a QR code displayed on either a point of sale tablet or receipt for the wallet-holder to scan. The idea of starting in university communities is not new. Clinkle is set to try [...]
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