I love headline alliteration and it’s good to have a shtick, so I will periodically post a “Feature Friday” here. It turns out I started last Friday with Capital One’s new mobile rewards feature, the ability to trade rewards points to pay for PAST travel (and they did it without resorting to time travel).

This week, old-school cash was in the news:

• Finovate fan favorite PayNearMe launched a mobile version of its cash-based payment service that allows users to buy online then take the receipt to 7-11 to pay in cash (or card). Until now, the system relied on a printed receipt to hand over to the cashier. And printing is so 2009. The new mobile version (inset), does away with the printing, allowing users to show the cashier a barcode rendered on a mobile phone. From then on, the process is the same.
• WalMart just launched a “pay with cash option” that works with its Walmart.com site (screenshots below). The company could extend the service to purchases at other ecommerce sites if it wants to drive more traffic to stores.

Relevance for Netbankers: While we don’t spend much time here discussing cash, it’s still important across most demographics. And banks have a huge stake in the game with their ATM bases and other cash-handling infrastructure.

Banks could do the same thing as PayNearMe, using their branch and ATM networks to take cash over the counter as payment. And many parents may prefer sending junior to the bank instead of the convenience store.

But I also wonder if we’ll see the reverse? Instead of handing cash over to the 7-11 clerk, parents can transmit a bar code to their kid’s mobile to allow them to walk out of the store with a crisp $20 for lunch and a bus ride home. And it would make sense to extend that capability to mobile-enabled ATMs and even branches.

Anyway, that’s all for this week, have a great one!

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Walmart homepage (27 April 2012)

Homepage popup lays out how it works

Walmart checkout
Choose “cash” icon under “enter a new payment method”