Mobile Payments: FAQ and not so FAQ

I have been working in the field of payments, specifically mobile payments for quite sometime now. If you haven’t noticed, a lot is happening in that area. The players in this field keep coming up with new stuff all the time; the field keeps coming up with new players all the time. Some of them just make sense, but some just don’t regardless of how hard we think. It is not their mistake. They are trying out new and innovative ideas hoping that one of them will click.

Mobile payments come with a lot of variables and not everyone has the knowledge or patience to understand all of them equally well. For instance, a credit card expert may not understand how HCE (Host Card Emulation) is affecting the SE (Secure Element); while an NFC expert may not understand how a Card network gets involved in tokenized transactions.  Apparently, it is not a surprise that many questions come to our mind that needs an answer – a short and simple answer.

My goal here is to try and answer these FAQs and not so FAQs for my benefit and reference. I plan to use a question/answer format where each question is answered in one short and simple blog post. As a general rule, I will prefer simplicity to absolute accuracy, because i don’t like my learning to be limited by some fine-print details. In many cases, I will restrict the details to the context of mobile payments to avoid information over-bloat.

I am confident that this will benefit me and hopefully it will benefit others too. I am also hoping that any expert stumbling across these blogs will offer their valuable thoughts thereby helping the rest of us.

Welcome to Mobile Payments FAQ and not so FAQ series. View all posts from the Table of Contents page