Prepaid and Mobile Commerce Proving Intersection

Remember in grade school when everyone seemed to have that new cool lunch box, and you still had a brown paper bag? In today’s shifting money management landscape, it’s kind of the same thing—but the lunch box is mobile commerce, and traditional money methods are that brown bag. Traditional methods seem to be on the outs, with mobile commerce sitting with the popular kids at lunchtime. New methods of management, including prepaid commerce opportunities and mobile banking, are starting to work together to change the scope of how you keep and spend money.

Prepaid and mobile commerce services seem to be depreciating the value of the physical bank and other day-to-day money management services in modern society. Mobile wallet and other such apps, however, are not mutually exclusive to prepaid commerce models—in fact, recent research has shown that they could drive each others’ innovation.

If banks are going to keep up relevance in the midst of this new market, an understanding of immediacy is key. Customers that frequently utilize prepaid and mobile commerce solutions develop an expectation of rapid and accurate answers to questions, and banks have to adjust their legal processes to fit this demand. This is especially true, according to research by Mobey Forum, when so many prepaid merchants are vying for market dominance over one another and over more traditional money methods.

Recent research has analyzed the intersection of prepaid commerce and mobile wallets, and found that providers such as Google, Apple, Starbucks, AtB, American Express (News - Alert) and T-Mobile are among the top players in the changing mobile game. Banks such as Danske and PostFinance are also strong responders to the forward-thinking ways of money management.

As the landscape of money management continues to change, new technologies are the new cool kids in school—and they might run the playground before long.