Do you think you know everything about mobile commerce and payments? 

Payfone CEO Rodger Desai to Discuss Evolving Online and Mobile Payments at Money2020 Expo

LAS VEGAS, Oct. 22, 2012 –  Today at the inaugural Money 2020 Expo in Las Vegas, Payfone CEO Rodger Desai will discuss the future of mobile payments in a panel moderated by Ken Paterson, head of research at Mercator Advisory Group. Prakash Hariramani, vice president, head of product at Payfone is also hosting the “Checkout and Payment” track today.

WHAT:                      Panel Discussion, “Evolving Online and Mobile Payments”

No more jumping through hoops to pay online…more choice and convenience to rival offline payment options. Early online payment systems either Internet-enabled mainstream forms of payment or built alternative systems that removed the friction of traditional payments. In this session, innovators will demo the latest solutions that further bridge online and offline payments — from facilitating cash and bank account payments for online purchases to paying for new types of expenses online, to next generation open development platforms.

WHO:      

Rodger Desai, founder and chief executive officer, Payfone

Souheil Badran, senior vice president and general manager, Digital River

Bill Ready, chief executive officer, Braintree

Nishant Mani, vice president of business development, Dashlane

Moderator: Ken Paterson, head of research, Mercator Advisory Group

WHEN:           

Monday, Oct.22, 2012

4:35-5:20 p.m. PDT

WHERE:         

Money 2020 Expo

Aria Resort and Casino

3730 Las Vegas Boulevard South

Room: Bristlecone

Las Vegas, NV 89109

About Payfone

Payfone is the leading mobile commerce company that links mobile identity with the payment process to help merchants provide an enhanced mobile commerce experience — from check-in to check-out. By leveraging loyalty credentials and other forms of customer data, Payfone’s unique technology helps merchants turn anonymous mobile users into loyal mobile customers. The company’s investors include Fortune 500 financial institutions and wireless service providers such as American Express, Verizon Wireless and Rogers Communications. Payfone is based in New York City with development centers in San Jose, Calif. and Denver, Colo. For more information, visit www.payfone.com. Follow Payfone on Twitter @payfone.

About Money2020, LLC

Money2020, LLC has pioneered a new paradigm in events for emerging payments and financial services—one that, above all else, values the experience of attendees, sponsors, exhibitors and speakers. With the Money2020 Expo, we’ve focused on everything that impacts that experience—from the comprehensive coverage of the ongoing evolution of money, to partnering with the industry to create the definitive community of innovators, to the high quality of the event location and catering. Watch introductory video on Money2020 Expo and get more information on Money2020 Expo at money2020.com.

Press Contact:

Laura Franzese

Bateman Group

415-503-1818

Payfone@bateman-group.com

###

September 18, 2012

Payfone’s new payment product will help users eliminate navigation steps and let them more quickly make electronic payments while shopping, says Vice President Prakash Hariramani. Investors include American Express, and the 1 Touch Checkout will be tested this fall in an effort to improve mobile payment use.

September 13, 2012

September 13, 2012

Payfone has announced ’1 Touch Checkout’, a “new mobile commerce checkout solution that connects shoppers’ mobile identities with their payment instruments to enable the easiest, fastest and most secure mobile commerce checkout experience possible.” Payfone also announced that CardinalCommerce has joined the Payfone Ecosystem as its channel partner.

September 17, 2012

Prakash Hariramani of Payfone uses the word pain a lot in discussing mobile payments. Time will tell if his company’s new mobile service will be a cure.

“We feel the mobile payment process is very painful,” says Hariramani, Payfone’s vice president and head of product.

Payfone’s new payment product, 1 Touch Checkout, uses mobile identity to directly execute electronic payments while shopping. The company hopes that will improve the user experience by removing some navigation steps.

Payfone, whose investors include American Express (AXP) and Verizon (VZ), will test 1 Touch this fall to find out how the model can improve conversion rates by offering consumers faster execution when paying via mobile devices, since the consumers tap their mobile screens only a few times to make a payment. According to Forrester, mobile shopping card abandonment market wide is about 69 percent, though the research firm attributes that abandonment to a wide variety of factors from comparison shopping to saving items in the cart for further consideration.

“Entering lots of information on a mobile site increases friction. We don’t want to ask people to change their shopping behavior,” Hariramani says. Payfone is also hoping to attract merchants by offering minimal upgrade expense or effort. Merchants register for the service online, and do not have to install special hardware on their point of sale devices.

To use 1 Touch Checkout, consumers enroll with participating card issuers on their mobile bank sites, and link their payment card numbers to their mobile phone numbers. Consumers can include credit cards, debit and checking accounts as sources of payment.

While shopping, consumers can visit the mobile app or mobile websites of participating merchants, where they can view an item, such as a train ticket, for example. Consumers can then choose from a menu of accounts that have been registered with 1 Touch. The user can then tap on the desired account for payment, without having to having to enter a card number, shipping or billing addresses, as is required for some mobile-enabled purchases. With 1 Touch, that information is already included in the initial account information at the time of registration.

“We believe the best way to drive a mobile shopping market is to create a payment ecosystem instead of another payment mark,” Hariramani says. To protect from theft, acquiring banks add a security code to authorize transactions. The security code is checked against the issuer, and if it matches, Payfone sends the name, address and transaction info via an encrypted pipe to the merchant.

The firm did not disclose the pilot’s bank partners or fee structure. It did disclose that CardinalCommerce, a payment platform that enables authentication and e-commerce transactions for clients such as Verified by Visa, MasterCard SecureCode, Bill2Phone, and Google Checkout, would test the Payfone product with a limited group of merchants.

Among competitive offerings is software from PayPal (EBAY) that allows consumers to use mobile phone numbers and a PIN to execute mobile payments at Home Depot without a special app or a card download. Mobile phone numbers are also becoming a popular way to execute person to person payments. Barclays, for example, enables account to account mobile transfersvia mobile number, a service also offered by PayPal and ClearXchange, the Wells Fargo (WFC), Bank of America (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) joint mobile payment partnership.

September 13, 2012

By the end of a Finovate, our brains go numb, one demo melds into the next, and we can’t quite remember what happened on Day 1. And we include the night of Day 1 in that.

But despite all that, we continue our tradition of shadow grading the Finovate demos. We don’t grade every demo, making accommodations for trips to the restroom, emergency phone calls from the head office, and, in some case, repeat demo-ers. With that caveat firmly declared, Bank Innovation’s grades for the Finovate Fall 2012 demos appear below.

Payfone

Cool Factor: B

I Want It: B

Profitability Potential: B

September 13, 2012

Payfone has announced ’1 Touch Checkout’, a “new mobile commerce checkout solution that connects shoppers’ mobile identities with their payment instruments to enable the easiest, fastest and most secure mobile commerce checkout experience possible.” Payfone also announced that CardinalCommerce has joined the Payfone Ecosystem as its channel partner.

September 13, 2012

US-based mobile payment processing company Payfone has launched 1 Touch Checkout, a mobile commerce checkout service that connects shoppers’ mobile identities with their payment instruments. Payfone has also signed a partnership agreement with US alternative payments services provider CardinalCommerce. CardinalCommerce has joined the Payfone Ecosystem as its channel partner. The company plans to roll out Payfone’s mobile commerce service to a network of merchants.

September 12, 2012 – 1 Touch Checkout relies on a consumer’s existing payment card.

Backers hope the service will boost mobile commerce conversion rates.

With all of the attention retailers put on mobile commerce as the number of smartphones and tablets in consumers’ hands continues to rise, one nagging metric haunts them. Mobile commerce conversion rates lag behind e-commerce rates, an average of 1.59% for m-commerce compared with the 3.18% e-commerce average rate, according to the Internet Retailer Mobile 300 and Top 500 guides. One culprit may be the cumbersome requirement to enter a 16-digit payment card number along with billing and shipping addresses.

Mobile commerce company Payfone hopes to change that with its 1 Touch Checkout service, which eliminates the need to type all of those digits and letters.

Payfone is relying on the existing payment infrastructure for this service, and not creating a digital wallet, says Prakash Hariramani, Payfone vice president of products. 1 Touch Checkout is not a separate payment mark, such as Visa or MasterCard, that retailers must find a place for on their m-commerce sites, he says. “We are not disrupting the payment ecosystem,” Hariramani says.

Consumers enroll in the service via participating card issuers, Hariramani says. He would not disclose which banks Payfone is in discussions with. Consumers link their payment card numbers to their mobile phone numbers, he says. When consumers want to pay with 1 Touch Checkout, the system checks Payfone’s database to verify the consumer has a stored payment method. Card issuers can require consumers to enter a code to verify transactions. That identity also contains their billing and shipping addresses.

Consumers can assign multiple payment accounts, including credit and debit cards and checking accounts, he says. Once the account is set up, the consumer can pay with 1 Touch Checkout at participating merchants. This eliminates the need for consumers to enter a credit card number and shipping and billing addresses.

The 1 Touch Checkout payment option is activated when the consumer taps the checkout button on an m-commerce site. A 1 Touch Checkout payment page automatically is presented for the consumer to authorize the transaction, or cancel and choose another payment method.

Merchants sign up for acceptance via companies that already offer mobile payment services, such as CardinalCommerce Corp., which is testing the service with some of its merchants. Hariramani would not say which other companies Payfone is in discussions with.

Currently, CardinalCommerce is testing 1 Touch Checkout with a small group of merchants, but CardinalCommerce expects to use its own direct sales staff and partner companies, such as payment processors and payment gateways, to sell the service, says Tim Sherwin, CardinalCommerce co-founder and executive vice president.

CardinalCommerce has not yet set a price for the service, he says. Its primary payment service is billed as a transaction fee.

Payfone would not say when 1 Touch Checkout will be broadly available. “We want to quantify before and after conversion rates and get more qualitative metrics before we launch a rollout,” Hariramani says.

September 12, 2012

US-based mobile payment processing company Payfone has made 1 Touch Checkout available, a new mobile commerce checkout service that connects shoppers’ mobile identities with their payment instruments. Payfone has also partnered with US alternative payments services provider CardinalCommerce.

Under the agreement, CardinalCommerce has joined the Payfone Ecosystem as its channel partner. The company is set to roll out Payfone’s service to a network of merchants to enhance the adoption of this mobile commerce solution.

1 Touch Checkout creates a mobile commerce checkout process by authenticating transactions through bank and carrier networks. The service ties the shopper’s identity to the mobile phone number.

Payfone authorizes and processes mobile payment transactions for application stores and merchants, leveraging the mobile operator network to directly authorize and process payments. In recent news, Payfone has entered a strategic partnership with mobile technology provider for nonprofit organizations Mobile Accord to expand the mobile donation channel for nonprofits and non-governmental entities worldwide.