Electronic payment solutions still subpar

Hacker News was all agog yesterday for details on the operation of MPesa, a mobile payment solution that was featured by National Geographic in an article yesterday. The venturesome tech community featured a wide range of opinions from cautious optimism to downright dismissal. I observed the conversation with cynical amusement but found it refreshing to find some knowledgeable patrons unobtrusively steering a productive discussion.

Part of the dismissal stemmed from a suspicion that the article was a shameless marketing job by a journalistic hireling masquerading as mainstream untinged reporting. I must admit that I felt a little bit of that suspicion when I read the article even though I could let that pass granting that the wanton disregard for technical depth stemmed from the author not having a Hacker-News-esque readership in mind.

The fact that I had written a piece about on-line and other electronic--basically seamless, cashless--transactions the day before made the reading a little weird but welcome. "This issue still piques the interest of dissatisfied market actors," the reasoning went. In my piece, I intentionally avoided a discussion of the numerous mobile money and proto-credit card solutions that have arisen in the past few years because I am not thrilled by them. I acknowledge them as progress in the vein of "steps in the right direction," but they simply do not cut it because they fail to answer the basic question: "Why can't I use my debit card (my money in the bank) to buy things on-line?" Gargantuan problems may be best solved by nibbling around the edges for a while, but I reject that as an excuse for tardy progress.