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Alan Reiter

Isis Explains Itself

Written by Alan Reiter
7/13/2012 Post a comment
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Isis, the mobile payments venture of three top US cellular operators, has posted a variety of videos explaining various aspects of its service.

AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless have established Isis to offer mobile payments, beginning with beta tests this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin, Texas. Many national and local retailers are participating.

The Isis Website has been public for months, including an introductory video. But yesterday GigaOM posted eight new video tutorials. The videos also are available on YouTube.

The brief videos explain the mobile payment features it includes (credit/debit cards, prepaid Isis card, loyalty cards, discount coupons), how to add payment cards, how to obtain discount offers, how to use the PIN and tap the device on a point-of-sale (POS) terminal, and why it's more secure than a regular wallet.

I've used Google Wallet for cellphone payments, and Isis seems similar. One similarity is that some POS systems allow users to pay for an item, including applying loyalty card number and a discount coupon, in a single step. Other systems, however, require the user to show the cashier the coupon's barcode on the phone's screen and then tap the phone to the terminal to pay.

I suspect this will be confusing for consumers. In fact, as I've been writing in Internet Evolution, mobile payments in the US will be confusing to many consumers for a long time as Isis, Google, and other mobile payment participants advertise competing systems, update POS terminals, and fix software and hardware bugs.

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