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Retailers push into crowded mobile payment market, BERLIN

A Wal-Mart representative demonstrates a Scan & Go mobile payment application on a smartphone in San Jose, Calif., on Sept. 19, 2013.




BERLIN - Big retailers are muscling in on the likes of Visa, MasterCard and Google in a fiercely competitive and growing mobile payment market that promises to cut transaction costs and increase customer loyalty.

Stores such as British supermarket Tesco and France's Auchan hope their "digital wallets" - apps which allow users to pay with their smartphones rather than cash or cards - will also give them more comprehensive data about customers' shopping habits than ever before so they can target advertising.

They are joining a crowded market - banks, card companies and tech firms like Google and Apple are all entering the mobile payment business, each hoping their app will become the industry standard. eBay's PayPal, well established in e-commerce, is also experimenting with the technology.

Retailers hope to attract customers to their own services by giving discounts and rewards to those using them, while also linking payments automatically to loyalty schemes and offering features like saved shopping lists.

The global market for mobile payments is forecast to grow about threefold by 2017 to some $721 billion worth of transactions, with more than 450 million users, according to research firm Gartner.

The growth could benefit retailers as the competition from a host of payment providers should help drive down the fees stores pay to have transactions processed - a service currently dominated by banks and card firms Visa and MasterCard.

"We view merchants as overall beneficiaries of the trend toward mobile payments," said Morgan Stanley, which estimated retailers in developed countries spent up to $150 billion in 2012 to accept card payments.

"Expected returns should justify any incremental investments required in enabling mobile payments technology," it said in a report in January.

However, it is still unclear how the retail mobile payment market will develop, with card companies and banks seen retaining a leading role in processing payments even if physical cards become obsolete.

Retailers' apps might struggle to take off as customers are unlikely to be willing to use a variety of services for different stores, but the success of Starbucks Corp in combining mobile payments with promotions shows big players can succeed.

U.S. RETAILERS

Starbucks, the world's biggest coffee chain, launched its mobile payment and rewards app in 2011. It already has 10 million users and the firm said this month it is looking for ways to expand the program beyond its own network.

"The mobile payments platform has given us a higher degree of frequency and higher degree of loyalty and the question is how can we leverage that beyond our stores," Starbucks Chairman and Chief Executive Howard Schultz told CNBC television.

An alternative path is also being explored in the United States, where dozens of top retailers including Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy have announced plans to set up a joint digital wallet service - the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX - though no launch date has been set.

Meanwhile, an attempt to create a mobile payment app universally accepted by retailers has recently launched in Germany. Yapital, owned by e-commerce firm Otto, has gone live in thousands of stores and also allows users to pay online and make peer-to-peer transfers.

Yapital Chairman Nils Winkler expects just a few players to survive of the 200 initiatives now clamoring for attention in Europe, with apps tied to retailers more likely to win out than those being developed by telecom and card firms.

"The biggest success in this field will be retail-based. PayPal is a good example that has grown tremendously based on the retail success of eBay," he said.

"CLEAR BUSINESS CASE"

Tesco, the world's third-largest retailer which pioneered the tracking of customer behavior with its Clubcard loyalty card two decades ago, will launch its digital wallet this year, as it also starts offering current accounts.

That is part of the British supermarket chain's eventual plan to use smartphones - and its own-brand Hudl tablet computers - to allow customers to navigate stores with their devices and scan products to buy them as they shop.

Sophie Albizua, co-founder of UK-based retail consultancy eNova Partnership, said her clients were ready to invest in overhauling outdated till systems to enable mobile payments. "People spent the last five to 10 years fine-tuning their websites. Now they have time to focus on something else."

French supermarket group Auchan, Europe's fifth-biggest retailer, launched its "Flash and Pay" electronic wallet about a year ago. It combines payments with coupons, loyalty cards, receipts and a shopping list feature.

"Our objective is to minimize costs. To have alternatives to existing solutions. All other solutions try to make costs for merchants," Arnaud Crouzet, Auchan head of global payments, told the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference in Berlin.

"It is difficult to imagine our data on our customers going through a third party," he added.

Britain's Centre for Economics and Business Research said there was a clear business case for digital wallets in terms of reduced costs and improved customer service and sales.

UK retailers could have saved 463 million pounds ($770 million) in transaction costs in 2013 by shifting to mobile payments from cash, credit and charge cards, it estimates.

Mobile payments could reduce queue length in stores by speeding users through tills and cut the cost of handling cash and card payments, it said.

Handling cash - which accounts for over half retail transactions by volume in Britain - is costly for retailers as it needs to be counted and guarded, costs equivalent to about 2.5 percent of takings, compared with about 2 percent for processing cheques and 1 percent for debit and credit cards.

However Carrefour, the world's second biggest retailer after Wal-Mart, thinks shoppers need more time to be convinced.

"For the moment, cards are still a good solution, especially contactless ones," said Frederic Mazurier, a vice-president for finance and risk management at Carrefour Banque. "It is going to take quite a few years more."

($1 = 0.6011 British pounds)

2014, Chile's M8.2 quake not 'the big one',

Getty Images: Aldo Solimano, AFP

A man stands among sunken fishing boats April 2, 2014, at the Riquelme Cove, in Iquique, northern Chile, after a powerful 8.2-magnitude earthquake hit off Chile's Pacific coast. The quake killed at least six people and generated tsunami waves that may ripple as far as Indonesia.

IQUIQUE, Chile (AP) — Authorities in northern Chile discovered surprisingly light damage and just six reported deaths Wednesday from a magnitude-8.2 quake — a remarkably low toll for such a powerful shift in the Earth's crust.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a state of emergency and was reviewing the damage in Iquique, a northern coastal city of nearly 200,000 people near where the quake struck in the Pacific Ocean. A planeload of 100 anti-riot police was deployed along with 300 soldiers to prevent looting and round up escaped prisoners.

Photos: Chile earthquake triggers tsunami alerts

Thousands of people evacuated from low-lying areas were returning home after a spending a long night outside due to the threat of a tsunami. The government's mandatory order to leave the coast was spread through cellphone text messages and Twitter, and reinforced by blaring sirens in neighborhoods where people regularly practice earthquake drills.

The tsunami lifted fishing boats onto city streets and sunk others in the port of Iquique, but no other major damage from the sea was apparent. Chile's entire coast was initially subject to the mandatory evacuation order, which lasted nearly 10 hours in coastal communitiesclosest to the offshore epicenter.

The shaking that began at 8:46 p.m. Tuesday also touched off landslides that blocked roads, knocked out power for thousands, damaged an airport and started fires that destroyed several businesses. Some homes made of adobe were destroyed in Arica, another city close to the quake's offshore epicenter.

Shaky cellphone videos taken by people eating dinner show light fixtures swaying, furniture shaking and people running to safety, pulling their children under restaurant tables, running for the exits and shouting to turn off natural gas connections.

Reuters: Stringer

People are evacuated from their shelter after a tsunami alarm at Antofagasta city, north of Santiago on the southern Pacific coast, April 1, 2014.

Mining in Chile, which is the world's top copper producing nation, was not affected, althoughworld prices for the red metal jumped as the quake raised supply concerns because most of the Chilean mining industry is in the northern regions.

About 300 inmates escaped from a women's prison in the city of Iquique, forcing the closure of the border with Peru. Several dozen were quickly captured, officials said.

Bachelet, who just returned to the presidency three weeks ago, waited five hours after the quake struck to address her nation. It was not lost on many Chileans that the last time she presided over a major quake, days before the end of her 2006-10 term, her emergency preparedness office prematurely waved off a tsunami danger. Most of the 500 dead from that magnitude-8.8 tremor survived the shaking, only to be caught in killer waves in a disaster that destroyed 220,000 homes and washed away large parts of many coastal communities.

"The country has done a good job of confronting the emergency. I call on everyone to stay calm and follow the authorities' instructions," Bachelet tweeted after Tuesday night's temblor.

Reuters: Cristian Vivero

A military convoy travels along a road after a tsunami alarm at Iquique city, north of Santiago on the southern Pacific coast, April 1, 2014.

She put her interior minister in direct charge of coordinating the emergency response, and announced that schools would be suspended in evacuated areas while authorities assessed the damage.

The only U.S. impact might be higher waves Wednesday for Hawaii's swimmers and surfers, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the temblor was centered in the Pacific Ocean 61 miles (99 kilometers) northwest from coastal Iquique. More than 20 significant aftershocks followed, including one of magnitude 6.2.

The quake was so strong that the shaking experienced in Bolivia's capital about 290 miles (470 kilometers) away was the equivalent of a magnitude-4.5 tremor, authorities there said.

But Tuesday night's quake was not the big one seismologists expect eventually.

Powerful Chile Earthquake Shakes Coast

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"Could be tomorrow, could be in 50 years; we do not know when it's going to occur. But the key point here is that this magnitude-8.2 is not the large earthquake that we were expecting for this area. We're actually still expecting potentially an even larger earthquake," said Mark Simons, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology.

Chile is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries because just off the coast, the Nazca tectonic plate plunges beneath the South American plate, pushing the towering Andes cordillera to ever-higher altitudes. Nowhere along this fault is the pressure greater than in far northern Chile, an area known as the "Iquique seismic gap".

The USGS says the seismic gap last saw a major quake in 1877, when a magnitude-8.8 quake unleashed a tsunami that caused major damage along the Chile-Peru coast and fatalities as far away as Hawaii and Japan. Another quake of similar force hit just north of the area in 1868.

AP: Cristian Viveros

A fire burns at a restaurant after an earthquake in Iquique, Chile, April 1, 2014. A powerful magnitude-8.2 earthquake struck off Chile's northern coast Tuesday night.

"This is the one remaining gap that hasn't had an earthquake in the last 140 years," said Simons. "We know these two plates come together at about 6, 7 centimeters a year, and if you multiply that by 140 years then the plates should have moved about 11 meters along the fault, and you can make an estimate of the size of earthquake we expect here."

The latest activity began with a strong magnitude-6.7 quake on March 16 that caused more than 100,000 people to briefly evacuate low-lying areas. Hundreds of smaller quakes followed in the weeks since, keeping people on edge.

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Luis Andres Henao reported from Santiago. Also contributing to this report were Eva Vergara in Santiago, Michael Warren in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Frank Bajak in Lima, Peru.