Competing Telecoms Are Joining Forces To Take A Piece Of The Payments Pie

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AT&T PROVIDES RETAIL BANKS WITH DATA TO ENHANCE BANKING APPS. Consumer banking is quickly moving towards mobile, and AT&T is looking to aid this transition by providing retail banks with a number of new APIs.

Retail banks can use these APIs to access data on banking customers who are also AT&T subscribers. This data can then be used to add features like geolocation, automatic form filling, and call recording to retail banking apps.

TELECOMS WORK TOWARDS A COMMON DATA STANDARD: The big hurdle for banks that are interested in using AT&T's APIs is that they are only useful for providing data on customers who are also subscribed to AT&T for mobile services.

To overcome this problem, AT&T and a handful of other carriers have been working together to come up with a unified standard for storing customer data so that it can easily be integrated into banking apps regardless of which telecom is the service provider.

At first glance it is a bit strange that these competing telecoms would be willing to cooperate with each other. But with the looming transition to mobile payments, an opportunity to take of a piece of the payments pie has basically fallen into their laps, provided that the telecoms are willing to work together. For example, these companies could easily generate revenue by providing identity authentication services to retail banks. (American Banker)

In other news...

BITCOIN WINNERS AND LOSERS: Business Insider's Rob Wile has a great summary of which companies are poised to win and lose as more businesses begin to accept Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Winners include IBM and Overstock.com. Remittance services like Western Union and card networks like Visa could be losers. (Business Insider)

CHARITY MADE SIMPLER: Digital Processing Solutions has announced a deal to provide its Digital Donations software to merchants who use Global Payments, Inc. as a payments processor. The software allows consumers to make donations directly to charities at points-of-sale in retail locations. (Charity Digital News)

P2P IN SPAIN: CaixaBank, one of Spain's largest financial institutions, announced that it will add a peer-to-peer payments feature to its digital wallet CaixaWallet. The feature will allow users to make transfers by email, texts, and by scanning QR codes. At the end of 2013, CaixaWallet and Caixa Virtual Prepaid cards had 600,000 active users. (Mobile Payments Today)

INDIA'S E-COMMERCE BOOM CONTINUES: E-commerce is exploding in India, expanding from $6.3 billion in 2011 to $16 billion in 2013, according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. Internet penetration in India is currently less than 10% which means e-commerce should continue to grow at a rapid rate. (ASSOCHAM)

SHOPIFY ADDS OFFLINE INTEGRATION: Shopify has redesigned its e-commerce app with new features aimed at helping retailers improve their e-commerce and offline commerce experience with new tools for tracking and inventory management. For offline commerce, the new software integrates with the company's Square-like mobile card reader. (TechCrunch)

VALUING BITCOIN: Business Insider's Jay Yarrow interviewed Bitcoin investor Charlie Dixon to find out if and what the value of Bitcoin is. (Business Insider)

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