Celent Banking Newsletter, January 2014

30 January 2014

Boston, MA, USA

From the Senior Vice President

It’s rare that the arcane subject of payments becomes front page news, but that’s exactly what happened with the recent data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus. The events have jumpstarted a debate around whether the US should finally make the leap to mass EMV deployment, a subject Celent has covered extensively (see our November report, EMV Migration in the US Progress Report: What Progress?). One question needs to be resolved: who’s going to pick up the costs of repairing this mess? Banks are going to be left holding the bag for at least some portion of it, even though they bear no culpability.

Payments, in fact, are gaining much wider prominence in the overall commercial ecosystem. Industry players are no longer discussing “mobile payments” as discrete events, but instead talking about “mobile commerce,” a broader concept that encompasses the entire shopping experience, from online retailers to payment facilitators to logistics providers. Consumers tend to view these as indistinguishable parts of the shopping experience, and seamless interaction between all the players in the commerce ecosystem is a necessity. When one party makes a mistake (think about all the Christmas presents delivered late), another often gets blamed. If a company is going to take the fall for a partner’s mistakes, it had better figure out how to help that partner eliminate those errors.

In the meantime, we’ve released a host of reports to usher in the new year; see the list below. And, as always, if you’ve got suggestions for topics you’d like to see covered, please let me know.

All the best for a productive 2014,

Dan Latimore. Senior Vice President, Banking Group

P.S. We will be honoring excellence in banking at the upcoming Model Bank Awards as part of our annual Innovation & Insight Day in New York on April 3. Register at https://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventId=1285653.

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