Payment Instruments: a thought exercise
One of the benefits of plane travel is the opportunity to sit in relative silence (except for the screaming child and angry passenger) and simply read.
Every flight that I take I either print, or load onto kindle, hefty materials that are otherwise difficult to consume. It is for this reason, in large part, that I dread the day of widespread availability of access from a flight…
Would it be nice to land without a queue of e-mail to send or receive?
Yes.
Would it be nice to land "caught up" on anything that happened during a lengthy flight?
Yes.
Will I miss the hours of focus on some esoteric bit of payments consultation data or reports that have been recently created?
Quite.
But, I digress.
During this flight, I read a paper entitled Person-to-Person Electronic Funds Transfers: Recent Developments and Policy Issues.. This paper was written by Oz Shy, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. In it he makes a statement that is powerful and that I will discuss in greater detail at the end of the week. The entirety of the paper is well worth consuming, but this quote tickled my brain as it relates to the deliver of payments APIs and highly-integrated software solutions.
In a sense, payment instruments can be viewed as "experience goods," goods whose quality users cannot assess without first trying them.
“experience goods”…keep this term in mind when you consider adoption not only of payment instruments but also of the strategy that goes into enabling payments integrations.
What’s your perspective? Agree? Disagree? Anything to add? Critiques? The comment form is below…
March 7, 2010