BostInno's State of Innovation is a month-long feature on mobile, marketing, retail and e-commerce, and higher education innovation in Boston. #BSOI will include research reports, indexes, and more exclusive content for Channel members and the State of Innovation Forum on June 27th. Contact us to learn more.
Mobile payments are coming, just not necessarily as fast as many of us had hoped. Local startup LevelUp has struggled to scale and Google Wallet is bleeding money. But it will happen -- it just makes too much sense not to. In the lead up to Thursday's State of Innovation Forum event, which will include a panel on mobile, we asked our panelists to place bets on the mobile payments race.
Specifically, we asked: Finish this sentence: The company that wins in mobile payments will be __________.
Here are our panelists, along with their answers to that question.
Moderator:
Sarah Hodkinson, Director of Marketing & Sales Strategy at PayPal - (not surprisingly) "PayPal"
Panelists:
Jeffrey Glass, CEO at Skyhook Wireless - "Paypal or another existing large player."
Raj Aggarwal, CEO at Localytics - "PayPal/Visa/MasterCard -- or other companies with a merchant network already in place, as that's the difficult thing to build."
Nataly Kogan, Co-Founder of Happier, Inc. - "A large financial services company that buys Square"
Alec Francesconi, President at Cantina - "Credit card companies"
Sravish Sridhar, Founder & CEO of Kinvey - No response
Note that, other than Kogan's mention of Square, startups are completely absent from the answers here. That's a shame, but it's in line with my own thinking. As I wrote about Google Wallet, the ability to take prolonged losses will help larger firms significantly as adoption of mobile payments continues to creep along.
Join us Thursday to hear more from the panelists on this and other topics, and let us know what your answer is to this question in the comments.
