The Key to Mobile Payment Success -- Failing Fast

The barage of news on mobile payment initiatives is almost overwhelming. The Wall Street Journal tells us that "Mobile Banking Shifts into High Gear" while Paymentnew.com delves into Visa's Mobile Platform Initiative. Every day brings another announcement:

• McDonalds will now take mobile payments in Japan through DoCoMo
• Near Field Communications will make mobile payments viable
  
• Cyphermint introduces its PayCash Mobile wallet
• Discover pilots mobile payments with Motorola
• Citi and Obopay team to test mobile person-to-person payment system
• Elan (a unit of U.S. Bancorp) and Sapphire Mobile Systems partner to offer mobile payments
• MasterCard will pilot a global payment system that will use mobile phone technology

Amongst all the hype, I finally found a nugget of wisdom to help make sense of all of this -- and from a Canadian publication nonetheless. The February 2007 issue of ITWorldCanada (now my favorite maple leaf tech journal) reports on a speech by W. Roy Dunbar, MasterCard's president of global technology and operations, ar the Card Forum & Expo in May 2006:

Dunbar says MasterCard has plenty of good ideas; the question is knowing which ones to pick. Dunbar joined MasterCard two years ago after more than a decade at Eli Lilly. One of the main concepts he brought with him from the pharmaceutical industry was the idea of failing fast -- that is, testing ideas quickly and discarding them if they don't work. In this way, one can accelerate the process of finding ideas that do work.

I like the idea of "failing fast." You can make a lot of jokes about the concept, but it does appear to describe what sucessful technology companies do well and what large financial service providers do poorly.