Competition and variety is good, but sometimes having too much variety can be bad as it also means that a clear and definitive standard has yet to be established. Imagine if MasterCard or Visa weren’t accepted widely at retailers? This means that some shops might only accept MasterCard, and some shops might only accept Visa, how troublesome would that be, right?
That’s pretty much the scene in the mobile payments game right now, and it looks like things are about to get a little more complicated. Xiaomi has recently announced that they will be teaming up with China’s UnionPay in developing their own mobile payments service. This service will be exclusive to Xiaomi’s phones (surprise!) but there is no specific date with regards to its rollout just yet.
However what we do know is that it will rely on NFC, which might be good news as NFC is starting to become increasingly common in smartphones these days. Like we said, things will get a bit complicated as there are so many players in the market. For example we have Apple Pay that is exclusive to Apple devices, and we also have Samsung Pay which is exclusive to Samsung devices.
Then we are looking at Android Pay which admittedly hasn’t really caught on as well compared to the others, and let’s not forget individual retailers such as Walmart who have decided that they should create their own mobile payments service as well. In any case we suppose only time will tell who will emerge the leader or preferred platform, but for now customers are basically spoilt for choice.
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