LITTLE ROCK — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is among the U.S. merchants that formed a new company, Merchant Customer Exchange, to develop an application for smart phones to pay for purchases and receive customized offers.
Other leading merchants participating in the project include Target Corp., Best Buy Co. Inc., Darden Restaurants, CVS Caremark, Sears Holdings, Hy-Vee, Lowe’s, 7-Eleven and Publix Supermarkets.
The new company, also known as MCX, said in a news release this week that nearly every U.S. smartphone owner is a customer at one or more of the retailers in the partnership. Combined, the retailers have $1 trillion in annual sales, MCX said.
“MCX will leverage mobile technology to give customers a faster and more convenient shopping experience while eliminating unnecessary costs for all stakeholders,” Mike Cook, Wal-Mart corporate vice president and assistant treasurer, said in the release. “The MCX platform will employ secure technology to deliver an efficiency enhancing mobile solution available to all merchant categories, including retail stores, casual dining, petroleum and e-commerce.
Jeremy Mullman, spokesman for MCX, said in an interview Friday that expansion of mobile payment is being held back because currently six different platforms are in use. To get traction, he said, the business needs one widely accepted platform that retailers use for mobile payments.
“It only works if you pay the same way at all places,” he said. “This is just the beginning. There’s more to come.”
Mullman said he’s optimistic that such a platform will be agreed upon soon, given the retailing powers at work.
“There will be scale when this thing arrives, just because of who’s behind it,” he said.
Separately, research is under way at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, in partnership with the Retail Industry Leaders Association, to evaluate theft prevention measures as electronic payment options expand. The focus is on whether current anti-theft systems are sufficient if shoppers bypass traditional checkout lines.
Competitors in the mobile checkout arena include Google Inc., whose payment application is used on some Sprint phones. Also, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile USA have jointly developed a competing platform.
Payment networks Visa and MasterCard have designs and apps, and PayPal, eBay’s payment service, also is on cell phones.
Business, Pages 27 on 08/18/2012