Mobile payments are still in their infancy. While Apple Pay and Google Pay continue to grow at a fast pace, only a small percentage of consumers use them in comparison to credit cards and other established retail payment options.
So with the competition still yet to take hold, the industry is ripe for disruption through blockchain technology and distributed ledgers, but only as long as that process is made as easy, and as quick, as using the incumbent payment methods.
A global payments acceptance platform, Beam, is combining mobile phones and blockchain technology to provide a way of providing that ease-of-use and speed necessary for retail payments. And the company believes the time is right to introduce an alternate mobile payments solution.
"There are examples where adoption has been less slow," Beam cofounder and CEO Serdar Nurmammedov told me. "In China, 90 percent of consumers use WeChat as payment for offline purchases. Take a place like the UAE, where the phone penetration rate is much higher than average at 228 percent, you'll find higher rates of mobile payment adoption. In Dubai, for example, we have seen consumers willing to pay using their mobile when incentivized to do so. Over there, merchants have managed to eliminate payment processing fees altogether on the Beam network."
So why does this need to exist? What's wrong with the old way of paying for products in-store?
The current retail economy is rife with inefficiencies. According to studies, $4.5 trillion worth of value is extracted from and wasted in the global retail ecosystem by incumbent intermediaries.
