The mobile payments battle is heating up and as if there aren’t already enough players we have another one that’s looking to break into this market. Big retailers like Walmart who form a group known as MCX are backing a new payments service called CurrentC and according to a new report this new payments service won’t be released at least until 2016.
It was originally planned to formally launch CurrentC across the country within 2015 but MCX CEO Brian Mooney tells Re/code in an interview that a wider roll out might not happen prior to 2016.
The company is going to start a public pilot of this payments service in a few weeks in Columbus, Ohio and until the product is deemed ready a wider rollout will be off the table.
“This is a long game,” Mooney said. “Certainly going faster is always better — that’s not necessarily a debatable point. But we’re going to do it right.”
Merchants backing CurrentC include Walmart, Kohl’s, Target, Exxon, Dunkin’ Donuts and more. The service will be platform agnostic and allow users to pay with their mobile device instead of using actual cards or cash. This is how it differentiates itself from the likes of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay which are not platform agnostic.
For now though it seems like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay have a clear road ahead of them and only when CurrentC arrives next year will we start to get an idea of how it can dent the lead that rival payment services will have established by then.
Filed in . Read more about Apple Pay, Currentc and Samsung Pay.