Today I’m at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas, where attendees are talking about the future of mobile payments. It’s an exciting time for all of us – as many continue to align around NFC as the industry standard technology, a key to accelerating merchant and consumer adoption.
Against this backdrop, today I’m pleased to announce Softcard has come to Windows Phone, reinforcing our leading positioning as the first and only NFC-based mobile wallet app supported on multiple mobile operating systems.
We believe in customer choice – it’s one of our core principles and an important factor in driving widespread consumer adoption. Giving consumers more choice is reflected in the number of devices supported by Softcard – I’m also pleased to announce that by the end of this year Softcard will be supported on more than 100 devices, another industry milestone.
Over the next 2-3 years this industry will grow rapidly. More phones will ship, more banks will be in mobile wallets and more merchants will accept mobile payments. To understand what the future of mobile payments can look like, we can look back at Softcard’s pilot in Salt Lake City, UT. Two years ago, we launched in Salt Lake City. Here’s what it looks like today:
- Payment active rates are 2.5 times the national average
- Taps per active user are 50% higher than the national average
- Salt Lake City users are 3.5 times more likely to engage with offers and 4 times more likely to use loyalty cards than the national average
This test represents a microcosm of how the mobile payments’ ecosystem will work when we reach scale. If Salt Lake City is any indication of what the future will be like for the rest of the country – it is indeed very bright.
–Michael Abbott, CEO