David Stone, CEO of CashStar, a Portland, ME based gift card company, said that at least one digital wallet already has risen to stardom, and he pointed to the Starbucks card. The technology works, he stressed – Starbucks uses simple barcodes, not fancy Near Field Communication (NFC) or other next-gen tools. And consumers seem to like it. “The Starbucks card is unique,” Stone said.
“But no one has broad adoption for a multi-merchant card.”
“It’s the consumer, stupid,” said Stone, and he stressed that for consumers to adopt a digital wallet en masse it has to be convenient and to able to be something approaching ubiquity.
