Eelco van Wijk (39) is General Manager for PayPal Benelux. PayPal (part of eBay, Inc.) is the most popular online payment method worldwide, with more than 100 million active accountholders.

Eelco has been working for PayPal since 2008, joining as Head of Sales for Benelux. Since last summer, Eelco is the General Manager for PayPal Benelux. Prior to joining PayPal, he worked at TNT for 6 years where he was commercially responsible for several internet propositions. Before that Eelco was the Dutch e-Business manager for system integrator Logica. He completed his Bachelors in Business Administration at Nyenrode University, and his Masters of Economic Studies at the University of Maastricht.

What are the key points you will be discussing at the conference?
Eelco van Wijk: During my presentation at the Webwinkel Vakdagen conference I will be focusing on the three main trends that currently change the way people shop: local, social and mobile. These trends enforce each other and will also impact the people’s shopping preferences: online and offline. We see a convergence of e-commerce and traditional brick-and-mortar retail. In the past five years, the latter have seen the former stealing market share. The market share of e-commerce has reached a turning point for brick-and-mortar players, as they’ve decided to step into the e-commerce arena using the best of e-commerce learnings, with the unique assets they have and which e-commerce players don’t. It is our belief that, through convergence of technologies, mobile will make the difference between online and offline retail disappear in the next five years.

What does the term "wallet in the cloud" refer to and what is the specific purpose of such a wallet? Are mobile payments moving towards a wallet in the cloud?
Eelco van Wijk: The wallet in the cloud is about creating a payment method user experience that is similar to the consumer, regardless of the location, the device used, the transaction value or the availability of hardware at the merchant.

Accessibility and ease of use are two important factors needed to make consumers embrace new technology. The same goes for mobile payments: if you want consumers to use it, ultimately, you have to make it understandable and you have to keep the entry barrier low. We believe that many financial institutions excel in creating perfect new payment setups for all possible different use cases, yet they fail to see that the consumer is not eager to have different user experiences, different access methods (and all the codes, passwords and tokens that come with it). The consumer wants it to be safe, yet also easy to use.

Our vision of the perfect payment method from the consumer point of view is one where you always have a recognizable front end experience for the consumers, whether they pay on their PC, via a POS device, his smartphone or even his X-box or a remote control.

How would you characterize the European online and mobile payments landscape?
Eelco van Wijk: Looking at the Forrester table below, we can see that in the European online payments space, there are three schemes that currently have a market share of 20% or even higher: bank-based payments, credit cards and PayPal.

Bank-based schemes have a big market share, but they are different in every country. Within most countries, there are even differences between different banks (let`s take Belgium for instance, where every bank has its own payment button, which didn’t help with the acceptance of their shared proposition Mr. Cash). Some of the solutions are made by new startups building on banks’ networks (with sofortuberweisung/ direct e-banking as the most successful solution). Because of this fragmentation, banks are not well equipped to deal with the current two trends: the internationalisation of European e-commerce merchants and growing market share of the largest players, as well as innovation, with m-commerce as the most prominent example today.

Another challenge for banks is that, unlike credit cards or PayPal, they don’t offer any type of consumer protection. Last but not least: payments are not always considered core business within banks, and payment professionals working in banks often have to fight to get some attention for their portfolio.

Credit cards are widely used and work more or less the same for every country, which is great for the large pan-European merchants. Consumer protection is easy and accessible. A challenge however is the perception of consumers: they often don’t know that by paying with credit card they are protected against not receiving their item and thus from a consumer point of view, this method is safer than online bank payments. A disadvantage I foresee for credit cards in the near future is that they might have a hard time in this age of segmented (or ever personalised) deals and the increasing attention for data. They have not yet found a way to harvest their own huge data reservoirs. And even if they manage to do that, there’s the customer ownership challenge in their intermediary model: in their model, nobody is really responsible for the customer (either consumer or merchant). So who will manage a deals platform and present those deals to the end-consumer: my bank, MasterCard, or an intermediary? Finally, there’s 3DS. I am still awaiting the first reports proving it is not a conversion killer, because most merchants I talk to are not raving about it. We have decided not to integrate 3DS until it is a proven success. After all, we have great security systems in place ourselves. Amazon has taken the same stance.

From your point of view, what is the role of the mobile in the European payments space? What does the mobile phone represent for Europeans?
Eelco van Wijk: The mobile phone bridges the gap between your PC at home and retail shops on high street. We see a widespread convergence taking place, making it difficult to put a tag on retail purchases. Let me give you an example: in the US we have just launched a new proposition with Toys ‘R Us. Let’s say you need to have a special toy for your son’s birthday, which is tomorrow, so you don`t have the time to order it online anymore. This tool combines m-commerce, including mobile payments, in store pickup, an online inventory management system and geo-location. So basically, you search the item on your smartphone, which not only gives you the location of all the different Toys ‘R Us stores in your proximity, but also which of the stores still have the particular item in inventory. So you know better than to just drive to the closest store to find out they just sold their last item. You buy the item on your smartphone, pay with PayPal and you’ll choose the “pick up in store” option. When you get there, the item will be waiting for you. Wrapped, if needed. I don’t know if this example is e-commerce, m-commerce or regular retail, all I know is that traditional webshops without brick-and-mortar stores will need to think of smart ways to match this experience.

The great thing about the mobile phone is that it’s always on, always close; even when we watch TV, sleep and yes, many people even use it when they visit the bathroom. It enables people to purchase items on any moment of the day, from any location. M-commerce tools offer webshops the possibility to have consumers buy items at the height of their attention peak: when they see your product on TV or read about it in the train, they can instantly gratify their desire by buying the items there and then. If they have to wait 30 minutes until they see the screen of their PC again, they might have forgotten it already, or even if they still remember it they might decide to compare prices, thus decreasing the chance they’ll buy the item from you.

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