(AT&T HQ, Atlanta, GA) – In an effort to simplify the path to payments marketplace adoption and citing frustration with the current “distributed ecosystem” model for payments, the Atlanta-based telco today announced plans to follow its T-Mo bid with offerings for purchase of Verizon, Discover, Barclay’s, VeriFone, Hypercom, FDC, Nokia and KMart in an effort to control an entire end-to-end payments ecosystem.
“We are committed to bringing the mobile and payments ecosystems together,” the CEO of what will be the nation’s largest mobile operator said in a prepared statement, “and we are dedicated to making the promise of mobile payments a reality as soon as possible, even if that means accelerating the promise of mobile payments by stringing all of the stakeholders in the value chain under one ‘stakeholder’ banner.”
Under the proposed roll-up acquisitions, the combined company – tentatively branded “ATISISTMoBarDiscHyperVeriNokiFirstMart”- would represent a veritable colossus astride the retail, payments and telephony marketplace. For perspective, some of the stats for the combined entity, compiled by PYMNTS.com and as yet unverified, could be as follows:
– Total mobile subscribers: 130 million
– Total payments cardholders: nearly 100 million
– Mobile device shipments: over 450 million
– Point of Sale devices: over 3 million
– Retail locations: hundreds of thousands
– NFC-enabled points of sale: in the tens of thousands!
– Martha Stewart co-brand relationships: 1
The combined company has announced plans to enable brand new devices, points of sale, readers, consumer account relationships and payments business models in the marketplace in North America within the next 18 months.
“We plan to offer robust remote telecommunications services, rich retail shopping, a high variety of telephony device options, reliable acquirer processing, terminal driving, credit issuance and end-to-end scaleable and reliable payments capabilities to the vast majority of American consumers, as well as delivering NFC payments to a select, exclusive handful of U.S. retailers, as we roll out the world’s first fully integrated payments capability and… -]~*_}>?~###<>^%%{*+&,$?-&/;$)-&/):?…” (message garbled and then dropped),” said a company spokesperson from a new mobile device riding the combined entity’s national cellular network.
(The views and facts in this article are 100% fabricated in honor of April Fools!)
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