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Paypal marketer says finance brands need to collaborate to succeed in tech space

Finance brands need to partner with each other in an effort to solve customer’s pain points rather than just create apps for the sake of technology in order to succeed in mobile commerce.

Speaking at the Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit, Paypal marketing director Elaine Herlihy said brands and merchants will see a tipping point to mobile payments “when we have apps that solve something fundamental that’s a pain point in your life”.

“There’s a collaboration around apps where we need to get together and say ‘how can we solve this problem?’,” she said.

Elaine Herlihy:

Elaine Herlihy: ‘Paypal doesn’t believe any one brand will own a space’

Herlihy said Paypal doesn’t “believe any one brand is going to own” any one space in the mobile commerce sector in the future.

“Everything that we’re about is about partnerships,” she said.

“It’s about from a retailer or a merchant perspective, it’s connecting someone with their customers, if you’re a merchant its connecting your payments with your accountancy software or your shopping cart and having it all in one frictionless experience, or as much as we can make that by integrating with other brands and partners.”

Westpac head of payment strategy Matthew Wood echoed her comments, saying banks are starting to seek external partnerships.

“We’re seeing banks more and more start to seek partnerships whether that’s with fintech, established payment players, payment networks.

“We’ve seen in the last few weeks Paypal has partnerships with both Visa and Mastercard. But putting that all to the side, some big bets are being made, but partnerships are crucial in this environment.”

The panel (l-r): Martin Collings (Mastercard labs); Gary Collins (Insight Associates); Matthew Wood (Westpac); Elaine Herlihy (Paypal); Mark Hodgson (Samsung)

The panel (l-r): Mark Hodgson (Samsung); Gary Collins (Insight Associates); Matthew Wood (Westpac); Elaine Herlihy (Paypal); Martin Collings (Mastercard Labs)

Wood said there is a lot innovation happening in the mobile commerce space but brands and merchants need to make sense of it for consumers.

“You may have a Paypal account, you may have a Visa Checkout or a Mastercard account, you’ll soon be able to pay online using Apple Pay on a Safari browser, that’s a lot of real estate for consumers to get their head around and for marketers to then promote,” he said.

“We’re at a point where there’s a lot of innovation happening, technology is enabling that, but all of this has to come together in a way that makes sense for consumers, and we’re not there yet.”

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