目次(Contents)
What is inconvenience to use credit cards?
Hello everyone!
Bangkok, where I was staying in the last week, is the hottest season in the year, when humidity is high, it is up to about 40 degrees as sensory temperature. When I returned to Japan, I felt keenly that May in Japan is the best season when we can spend very comfortably.
Well, last time I wrote about the actual condition of Japanese who was influenced on the choice of settlement method by how they get points. However, even though the influence is excluded, in general, Japanese people do not like to borrow money fundamentally, so I think that there are still many people who avoid using credit cards.
On the other hand, we do not think that it is absolutely convenient to use cash that is troublesome to log as to what we used.
If credit cards issued in Japan have a function of alerts sending by SMS at the time of use and they have a timely historical record of use, which are similar to prepaid cards and debit cards, I think that people who use credit cards will increase in Japan.
Japanese credit cards operations are generally late to complete transactions by so-called Base 2 (settlement) which comes to Issuers compared to overseas (in recent US it takes only two days or one day, but in Japan it takes three days at least. Some comes once a month! )
It may be because of that, many of usage history are not updated in a timely way.
Therefore, it is not convenient for us to use credit cards to manage households because of the lack of those kinds of functions. In other words, credit cards issued in Japan are functionally insufficient.
Brand Prepaid cards are very smart to use
Since I used to use a global standard leveled brand prepaid card, I experienced convenient alerts to notify us of the usage amount, store name, available balance. I think that the most convenient is to use Brand prepaid cards to manage households, because of timely alerts, quickly updated the usage history.
People who have similar thoughts seem to be surprisingly many (especially housewife), those who with such an idea seem to manage households using a brand prepaid card issued by mobile carriers.
In Japan, Mega mobile carriers issue brand prepaid cards. Among them, au (KDDI) is a pioneer, who has distributed cards eagerly, which has been named “au wallet”, now it is one of major brand prepaid cards along with Line Pay card.
Since the carrier collects the mobile fee once a month by credit card settlement or automatic bank debit, then, the card usage amount is also collected at the same time, although it is a prepaid card, which is usually loaded in advance beforehand.
In Japan, they also offer such services to users.
The good point of this “paying collectively afterwards”
1. The amount that can be post-payment is relatively small, and it matches for household management and pocket money management.
2. You can save time and efforts to load into the card in advance
3. It is a payment later, so the actual condition is credit, but, there is a periodicity over credit card withdrawal, and since it is always withdrawn, there is a sense of satisfaction that it will not be a debt.
4. Although it is not debt, since it is withdrawn on a specific day, it is easy to grasp the amount of money used for a period rather than using cash.
As such, it is operated according to the sensitivity of Japanese people, and since it is a prepaid card, we can manage how much use as household accounts and can check the total of amounts and its history timely
Upgraded business model in the future?
In consideration of the payment history of mobile fees in the past, the mobile carrier allows post payments for only the amount authorized by carrier that they consider there is no problem. So in this business model, unique credit (credit) management is adopted.
The reason why this business model is effective at the carriers is that considering the cost of setting loading bases at convenience stores or mobile shops and the troublesome for the user who loads money in advance, even if there is some collection risk, this Small Credit is also considered to work well in terms of costs (it can be used without loding beforehand, so the using way is like credit cards. This is one of familiar points for Japanese.).
Naturally, since you do not need interest rates to the post-pay, users can use it with confidence.
It is a business model that can be done by a large business scaled companies such as mobile carriers, but, this business model may be a model that will not work well if SIM-free mobiles are penetrated and royalty for mobile carriers declines.
There are several companies that are trying to realize the evolved form of this business model, one of the leading companies is Mercari in Japan. So it is important to know who would expand this business model by evolving the current business model in the future.
To be continued
