CurrentC

» see currentc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

CurrentC was US retail politics disguised as an app. It was born as a carrier-and-cashier layer at the register, and it never had a reason to reach Turkey. A group of the largest american chains formed a company called MCX in 2012, and the whole point was to build a wallet they controlled, one that skipped the card networks' fees and kept the shopper data for themselves instead of feeding it to Apple. From Ankara this was invisible. It was a fight over american checkout lanes.

The mechanism told you everything. Where Apple Pay let you tap a phone against a reader, CurrentC made you open an app, scan a qr code off the cashier's screen or let them scan yours, and pull money straight from your bank account. It was slower and more awkward than the plastic card it was meant to replace. Worse, before it even launched properly the system was hacked in october 2014 and leaked the email addresses of everyone who had signed up to test it.

The consortium came apart from the inside. Best Buy broke ranks and turned on Apple Pay in 2015. Then Walmart, the anchor member, went off and built its own Walmart Pay. MCX ran a small beta in Columbus, laid off thirty people in may 2016, and set 28 june 2016 as the last day it would accept a transaction. The technology MCX had built did not vanish. JPMorgan Chase bought it in 2017 and folded it into Chase Pay.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

CurrentC was designed backward. It solved the retailers' problem, which was fees and data, and it asked the shopper to absorb all the inconvenience in exchange for nothing. Apple Pay was faster and it already sat on a phone people carried. Once the member stores started accepting the thing they had banded together to block, the alliance had no reason to exist.

~ what carried over ~

The lesson outlived the app. A payment method has to be easier than the card in your pocket or it dies, and a coalition of rivals only holds together while none of them has a better private option. Walmart Pay, which came out of one member quietly cheating on the pact, still works today. CurrentC is the case people point to when a group of giants tries to design a consumer product by committee.

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