Towards a more Competitive Mobile Payment Industry: Standardization and Beyond

Mobile payments are becoming increasingly popular around the world. In countries like China, they appear in the form of barcode payments and are poised to replace cash and bank card payments for day-to-day consumer purchases. Against that backdrop, this paper analyzes the availability of barcode standardization as an approach to interoperability and ultimately to enhanced competition in the mobile payment industry. It uses the Chinese industry as a study case, which features a duopoly structure and shifting competitive dynamics among three definable groups of market players. This paper confirms that standardization can enhance competition and argues that, in this case, a government-mandated standardization is preferable to a voluntary one because the latter is prone to financial market failures. Along this line, this paper makes three suggestions for furthering the barcode standardization. It also advises prudence and competitive neutrality for the financial regulator and calls for more active involvements of the competition and data protection authorities.