Bloomberg is reporting that the payment app CurrentC which was developed by Merchant Customer Exchange (with funding from Walmart, Target & Best Buy) will have limited testing sometime in August. The app has already been tested by some of the employees of the retailers that have been involved in the development of CurrentC. CurrentC is expected to have a wide scale launch “sometime in Q3”.
CurrentC is probably the worst payment app that currently exists, rather than using near field communication technology (NFC) like Apple Pay & Samsung App, the app requires you to scan a paycode (basically just a QR code) at the cashier. CurrentC will have it’s own rewards program and in built coupon system as well.
It’s quite obvious that CurrentC was built by merchants that wanted to avoid paying costly credit card interchange fees, rather than focusing on what consumers actually wanted. My hope is that when CurrentC launches they’ll offer lots of different incentives to try to sway consumers to use their payment app.
At the moment I think Samsung Pay is the most likely to succeed as they utilize NFC, but as part of their acquisition of LoopPay it can also be used on terminals that don’t have NFC enabled. Although I think any payment system tied to a specific mobile phone manufactured or credit card payment network will ultimately struggle as people typically aren’t brand loyal.
I’m excited about the future of mobile payments and the possible promotions that will come once all of these new services finally launch and try to capture market share.
