There seems to be a lot happening in the financial services space these days, some of it good, and some of it clearly a wrong turn however well intentioned. [None of the latter shown below]
Underbanked Americans
The Centre for Financial Services Innovation, whose focus is the low end of the demographic spectrum, has just released new research results on the underbanked. Some 40 million households are unbanked (no active bank account) or underbanked (may have a bank account but is actively transacting with non-banks).
The demographics are interesting: more than half own a home, more than half are white/non-Hispanic, and almost half work full time. As you read the attitudinal and behavioral material, the surprises just continue. A six page download presents a good summary, including an overview of 8 attitudinal segments. There is also a free webcast scheduled for July 8.
Payments in your watch
Why have your paypass on your key-fob when you could have it in your watch? That's the reasoning behind the launch of the Altair's PayPass wristwatch that uses MasterCard's contactless payment technology. This is not the first such innovation, but we're bound to see more of this in the future, through the competing technologies related to telephones or cards. Reminds one of the cable versus telephone battle that still wages. (Read more about this in Finextra here).
Visa on Facebook target SMBs
Visa has launched a new social networking application through Facebook target SMBs. The incentive to join is $100 toward targeted Facebook advertising, an interesting idea. Features include expert Q&A that would be similar to LinkedIn. I applaud them for trying this, and building an application that could potentially provide support for things other than information. What I'm not sure yet is how you prevent these things from becoming a really giant version of the Yellow Pages. (Thanks again to Finextra for the heads up)
Mobile P2P payments
MasterCard has launched a P2P payments network accessible through your mobile phone, in the US. The story from Finextra references Tower Group research suggesting that the growth curve here is exponential. The target market here is the underbanked -- the 40 million households referenced above -- and the huge international remittance business.
The major impediment to widespread adoption of this kind of service will be that it threatens the existing infrastructure. But people are bound to like the idea of having the bank machine in their pocket.
Teens and technology
I did some research on teens use of technology that gives strong support to the notion of the handset as the main access device. Imagine mobile computing without having to drag a laptop around -- how cool would that be! I put the slides for a recent presentation on this project on slideshare.
