Robert Hackney, CEO of Card Services for Credit Unions, a trade association for CUs that issue their cards through FIS, sees the future of mobile payments belonging more to banking apps that provide a payments function from within the app than to standalone mobile payments apps.
“I think it’s like mobile banking,” Hackney said. “In that we will hit a tipping point where consumers will really want to start using it, at which point demand for the service it going to grow swiftly while demand for checks will decline.”
Hackney said he had seen a prototype of such an app a recent FIS conference and said he thought it would carry a lot of consumer interest as well as garnering attention from credit unions.
Hackney believed such a universal mobile banking app would succeed because consumers would more likely accept a mobile payments function in an existing mobile banking app than they would accept downloading a whole new app.
He also noted that while the mechanism for accessing money in a checking or credit account would begin to differ as mobile payments continued to grow in popularity, the business of backroom credit or debit account management would remain largely the same.
