Plastic Is Dead, Barclaycard Managing Director Admits

Anthony Jenkins Barclaycards Managing Director confidently predicted that plastic had no future and that the future of payments was in Near field Communications.

That’s a bold statement from Europes biggest Visa issuer and acquirer. Especiually when major handset providers were only last year saying there was no demand for NFC (Sony Ericsson).

Barclaycards pilot of NFC first with O2 and then the roll out with Orange are clearly expected to make waves.

When I was at Barclaycard working on Visa Cash with BT Cellnet we piloted Visa Cash reloading mobile phones some 15 years ago, but this is different. In those days we were still trying to bring the MNOs to plastic for content purchases – the dual slot battle is lost – now the payment is moving to the phone.

The choice of Orange is interesting. The geographic fit is better. O2’s strength through its parent Telefonica is in Spannish speaking areas of the world. Orange fits better in most of Europe (excluding Iberia).

France telecom have experimented off and on with payments. They were one of the first to adopt a payment wallet (“wHA”) as a precursor to the ill fated Simpay.

But sometimes it is the people. Orange is now run in the UK by Tom Alexander who used to be one half along with Graeme Hutchinson of the old Barclaycard BT Cellnet relationship that sold 1million phones in 1999 and the core team went on to form Virgin Mobile. Having spent 8 years trying to build a relationship with Vodafone, Barclaycard is back with someone who they can do business with.

Various members of the old team are back from Virgin Mobile in the Barclaycard NFC team so it will be fun seeing how it pans out.

Business is about people.