Who owns the Customer anyway?

The nature of convergence across industry sectors surrounding a common area like payments, has continued to plague new business models with old conventions and arguments.

The nature of a co-brand card product or affinity card often saw tensions appear around who has the right to communicate with the Cardholder or Customer, and at what frequency. In this scenario, the partners (often a retailer and a bank) would both see the card as their product and as such their Customer.

How do you establish a framework whereby each partner understands the value that they are bringing to the proposition and assigns its Customer ownership on that basis? eg financial risk management with the bank versus branding and transaction benefits with the retailer!

The advent of Mobile remote payments and the use of a mobile as the "trigger" for payments in one of multiple approaches, is something that now brings this issue to a new head.

A clear path on which parties can provide innovative payments services to the mobile phone/cardholder/Customer is required. The current debate on who should be involved in a solution provides the foundation for numerous and disparate solutions being offered in the market.

On the one hand we see parties seeking to exclude interaction with the telco community, while others see the telco as leading the trend. Will this turn Customers away through confusion and mis-trust? Can the "Value Provided" argument for each party involved, not lend itself to resolving some of the issues in this debate?

A collaborative approach that mirrors aspects of and learns from, more than 50 years in the 'often taken for granted' card payments market could be one avenue. That is, the establishment of a business framework that recognises the standards and regulations of each unique sector yet has a common set of rules for engagement.

The challenge however continues to lie with international standards and importantly an increasingly fickle Customer base who demand more and more as they become educated about the ways in which they can interact and conduct commerce. They want usability, security and reliability to retain Trust.