Pascal, CorFire is on the spotlight with 2 majors news : the Dunkin payment app and the wallet for Vodafone Group, how can you present this new entrant ?
CorFire is a subsidiary of SK C&C (the IT arm of SK Group in Korea). It is focused on the development of m-commerce solutions for merchants like Dunkin’ Brands, mobile operators like Vodafone, and financial institutions like Citibank. We have an array of products and services ranging from TSM (we power up the Google Wallet with FirstData), to mobile wallet (Dunkin app and Vodafone wallet), to mobile marketing (offers, gifting with inComm, and loyalty).
We are fairly new in Europe but actually have extensive experience in commercial deployments with 10+ years across Asia and North-America. Today we enable more than 3 million active mobile wallets generating 30 million daily m-commerce transactions (aggregate of payment, offers redemption, transit access, loyalty).
What's is the strategy of CorFire ?
CorFire is rapidly expanding in Europe with the Vodafone deal as well as others that will soon be announced. Our focus is to ensure they will be commercial successes and serve as reference points to other prospects and prove the value of m-commerce services to consumers. This is not only essential to CorFire but also to the nascent mobile commerce ecosystem.
We excel at bringing innovative services and at execution. We will keep capitalizing on those strengths to win more deals and bring new services to market. We intend to grow first organically and then by acquisitions as we reach the inflexion point.
Our product strategy will essentially remain anchored around our existing portfolio: TSM, Wallet, and Mobile Marketing. We will continue enriching these products as customers and end-users’ needs evolve.
What will be the next step ?
An immediate next step for us is to recruit talents to support a number of deals we have in the pipeline.
As payment expert, how do you see the payment evolution ?
The stars seem finally aligned. We should see rapid adoption of mobile commerce services. This is thanks to high smartphone penetration, consumers’ willingness to invest their personal time to learn new mobile services that will simplify their lives, an emerging contactless POS infrastructure, and emulation from success stories like Dunkin’ and Starbucks.
This means that mobile will keep becoming more central to payment and pave the way for new players to offer compelling alternatives for face-to-face payment. Square, PayPal Here, MCX (Merchant Customer Exchange payment association driven by Wal-Mart), and a slew of new entrants could not have seen the light without mobile. They offer to merchants chargebacks protection and merchant discount fees comparable if not more attractive than Visa and MasterCard’s. They will increasingly put pressure on the payment networks to change their operating regulations such as the creation of a third category between Card Present and Card Not Present to accommodate cloud payment situations.
Another trend mobile will spur is the multiplicity of payment instruments. Today your wallet has limited space for all those closed-loop cards. With mobile and mobile wallets, this is obviously not the case anymore. We are going to see more growth in merchant cards. The successes of the Dunkin’ and Starbucks apps are quite telling. There will be new split tender mechanisms where by the consumer at checkout can partly pay with her Visa card, gift card balance, and reward points.
Finally, we see POS to go through a major overhaul. Mobile facilitates self-check-out (Apple EasyPay is a quite impressive example) and the concept of store check-in and tab opening (with PayPal Here or Square you just need to mention your name and show your face at checkout). If they gain traction these new ways of paying will completely change the POS environment.
VP, Business Development & Strategy
CorFire
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