Last week my friend and I went to downtown Vancouver to watch the Paralympics opening ceremony. After the event we decided to go to Amarcord Italian restaurant (http://www.amarcord.ca) in Yaletown to have some pasta. When we get the bill, I notice something interesting on the bill jacket – a big QR barcode and a name “Mobio”:
Amarcord bill with Mobio payment barcode
After going home, I did some research on Mobio (http://mobioidentity.com) and figured out that it is a mobile payment service. According to the demo video, a user needs to download an iPhone app (Blackberry and Android app coming soon), register an account, and point your phone camera to the barcode to initiate a transaction.
Mobio demo video
Watch video here: https://mobioidentity.com/about/company
I am advocating the mobile payment idea (Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_payment), and glad to see another attempt that leverages the popular iPhone platform. My thoughts:
- Need stronger branding and marketing campaign. I really haven’t heard of it at all
- More appealing website with video and simple comics/illustrations to show customers how easy it is to join and start using it.
- Must also make it SUPER easy for merchant/everybody to create an account and start using it. In the website it doesn’t make it very clear how the merchant side operates. Do you admin using web interface? Desktop app? Another mobile app for the merchant account? Does the transaction happen in realtime? How can a merchant confirm right away that the money is securely deposited? And again, don’t make me read too much. I prefer pictures and video tutorials.
- In terms of UX, need to make it less than 1 minute from seeing the Mobio URL on the bill to finishing the payment.
My thought on the workflow:
- Open the Mobio app
- Enter a passcode
- Camera pops up and ready to snap the QR code
- Choice to enter card number manually or snap a picture of your credit card. If snapping a picture, the app does OCR immediately to get the credit card number.
- QR code should also embed the transaction amount and description, so it saves customers’ time and effort to punch in the numbers.
- Optional tips by amount or percentage
- Enter Expiry and CVN printed on the back of the card
- Verify the payment. Slide to pay (to avoid accidental click)
- Done! Receipt appears on the screen as well as sending an email to you if email address is provided. Option to save the receipt as an image into the camera roll
Important notes:
- No registration necessary. I don’t want to remember yet another set of username/password in order to just pay for a lunch. User can optionally choose to remember credit card number (but always forget CVN) and email address. However if user choose to create a Mobio account, then it’s possible to check payment history, remotely block credit card charge, and set up daily/monthly credit limit (to prevent over puchasing)…etc
- Ensure that the transaction process is ATOMIC and REVERTIBLE, meaning if a call comes in and interrupted the transaction process, no charge will be made to the credit card, or at least restore the screen to the proper state before the call kicks in.
- (Updated Mar 22) When the customer’s transaction is completed (in his/her own headset), the merchant can IMMEDIATELY see the completed transaction in their own handset IN REAL TIME as well. It’s crucial for the store owner to trust the system and be sure that money will come into their bank account. SMS/Push notification are good alternatives for the alert. Even more fun to have a “KA-CHING” sound effect, or Fred Flintstone saying “Yabba dabba do.”
Aug 2010 Update:
For more blog posts about Mobile Payment please go to this tag page.
Related posts:
- Mobile Payment
- Mobile Payment Update
- Flashcode in Paris – Bus Route and Advertisement
- QR-code Use by Real Estate Agency
- Local Map in Train Station with Mobile Phone “Touch Download”
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Please contact me at my email. Interested in discussing your ideas.
Michael, thank you for your comment.
Regarding companies that are currently using QR-code or similar technology as part of their payment process, I don’t see a lot out in the market. Mobio is one of the earliest companies that tries to offer such service. But here are some other insights:
- http://portapayments.com one of the entries of the PayPal X Developer Challenge. Idea is almost identical to Mobio except payment system is provided by PayPal. It should have great potentials.
- http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/qr-code-marketing/ Using QR-code to as a campaign tracker. The provider’s server keeps track of how many times a QR-code is used, especially on self-printed email coupons.
- https://www.facecash.com/ FaceCash uses barcode instead of QR-code. The idea is the reverse of Mobio: Merchant identifies you by scans your FaceCash barcode on the mobile device screen, then go on to charge the bill from your FaceCash deposit. It’s clever for them to pick barcode instead of QR-code since the penetration of barcode scanner is much higher, so there’s lower barrier for merchant to modify their existing systems for the service.
- China Unipay http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90778/90859/6922545.html again not QR-code, but mobile payment platform for huge market in China.
It’s been a while since I touched this topic, if you see something interesting a well please share it with me.
Cheers,
Calvin
Hi Calvin,
My name is Mike and I’m new to the bar coding systems used by MobioID and Flashcode; I was wondering if you knew of other companies that are using similiar mobile payment systems with the 2D coding system.
As a note, I’ve learned a lot from your articles and while the upside is tremendous there are manageable barriers to penetrating this market. Thanks!
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Thanks for your comment, Tim. I notice that mobile payment is getting more attention this year, where big brand like PayPal is determined to push further into this market.
Just read: https://www.x.com/people/PayPal_Jennifer/blog/2…
Hope your company can keep innovating and be successful.
Some thoughts:
- availability on different platforms is important. Big ones like iPhone, Android and Blackberry are important for North America and Europe. And Windows 7 Phone (I can never remember it's official name) is coming too.
- Maybe shift your focus to non-US and/or developing countries?
- Open API? Encourage collaboration with other companies/service providers. Have a shared, unified merchant database. Compete on user experience, not a silo of merchants. Feels like that's one way to fight against big ship like PayPal.
I'm going to travel in Japan at June, so perhaps I'll get more inspirations from their systems.
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hey Calvin – I thought you provided an interesting take on the app and service, wireframes and all.
we've learned a lot by working with our early customers such as amarcord, they've all been truly great and provided us a medium to learn what works and what can be better. I'm keen to show what we've developed based on all the feedback we've received. the results of that work will start to become available in the ~short term as we begin to roll out features and improvements more regularly.
some of what you touch on does exist today, ex the merchant perspective feature functionality, real time payment notifications et al. we will improve on bubbling up this sort of information to end-users.
interested in continuing the conversation as we move forward.