Showtime!

We’re into October. The leaves are turning, the bow hunters are in the trees, the World Series is around the corner and it’s conference season for the financial services industry.

Two weeks ago we had the ATM and Mobile Executive Summit, jointly hosted by the ATM Industry Association and the ElectronicFunds Transfer Association. Last week we had Money 2020 in Las Vegas. Up next is the ATM, Debit and Prepaid Forum, followed in early November by EBT—the Next Generation 2013, the premier e-government payments show in the country.

The message of mobile wallet weaver Isis its Money 2020 audience was “you seen seen nuthin’ yet.” The Isis dream weavers see a world reshaped with mobile technology by the end of this decade. Theirs is a world where half of all transactions will be mobile by 2020.

If anything, Money 2020 showed the payments industry that its horizons must expand.  It’s no longer enough to have a single-focus show that just caters to ACH, or ATMs, or POS.  New technology like mobile will re-define all of those payments technologies and more. You can’t look at them in a vacuum. Make way for the inter-industry show.

Despite the focus on alternative payment technology, Money 2020 also showed that EMV continues to hold center stage as the topic most on the minds of the people who design and manage our payment systems.

The message about EMV was clear.  The fraudster factory continues to turn out taller and taller ladders to breach higher and higher payment-security walls. So the mission remains to find the best way to secure consumers’ transactions at the point-of-sale. Until somebody comes up with something better, that looks like EMV.

Some people will argue that as the world’s biggest economy we don’t have to march to the rules of other countries. We get to make our own rules. Others will say there is no business case for EMV. Still others will say that the venerable magnetic stripe will be around for a long time, making the argument for global interoperability a red herring.

All of this may or may not be true.

But its too bad consumers don’t get to vote in this debate. Because I think they’d say that anything that reduces their chance of being defrauded and incurring the pain of rebuilding their financial accounts and reputation is a good thing.

So, in the final analysis, the business case doesn’t matter, what the good folks in Lichtenstein are doing doesn’t matter, nor do the two EU tourists a year that visit Kelly Galloup’s fly shop in Cameron, Montana matter much. What matters is that U.S. consumers retain their historic confidence in the electronic payments system—a confidence that wanes with every skimming story in the local news—and continue to pull out the plastic at merchant locations. That’s what really matters in this debate. 

Certainly there are legal and political dimensions to EMV. But the Durbin Amendment and the Leon smack down of the Fed should be sideshows to the center stage. And that remains occupied by a vast cast of characters trying to overlay EMV on the world’s biggest payment system.

Sure, Money 2020 showcased many alternative payment schemes, including Bitcoin—either the most liberating, democratizing payment event in he history of man or payment disaster waiting to happen, depending who you talk to. Interesting. Provocative.  But at the end of the day, over cocktails in the bar, where business really gets done, the story was still EMV.