The banking sector is unwieldy for anyone to navigate, especially those without experience in it. The sheer amount of Compliance, legal issues & Audit involved is immense and often a shock to the uninitiated.
What Jack Dorsey is doing with square is interesting much more for the payments platform than the Magstripe reader. Twitter knows how to be an Open API and unleash 3rd party apps. What they don’t know is how to navigate the Audit minefield. Security is paramount in the financial world, and often the reason their technology lags behind other sectors.
Change in the financial sector works in decades not years. If Square can succeed where PayPal almost did a decade ago, by breaking the dominance of Visa and Mastercard then we might just get Payments as easy as a Foursquare check in.
History teaches us that old Gatekeepers don’t give up power easy though.
Where does Apple fit into this? They have a tendency to build everything themselves, to a fault. Apple Video just has not taken off, while Hulu, Boxee and Youtube all threaten to leave it for dust. Apple entering the Payments sector could well produce the same result.
Somewhere between the OpenID/ OAuth discussion, Square, Paypal X & NFC is the answer. Who can put all of those jigsaw pieces together is anyone’s guess. The list of people trying is astronomical though.
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