LIVE FROM THE GSMA’S NFC & MOBILE MONEY SUMMIT, NEW YORK: Retailers need to address the complexity of consumer experiences if they are to drive the uptake of mobile payment and redemption in their stores, industry players said in this morning’s keynote.

Neil Garner, founder and CEO of NFC vendor Proxama, said “a piece of the puzzle that we see as broken” is the process by which consumers get a coupon, offer or discount from their phone to the till.

“You can do it via NFC, you can do it via QR card, you can flash up a unique code to the merchant or the merchant can just look at the coupon. But all of those things give a fragmented consumer experience,” he noted.

“In this world where you’re going up to the till with your mobile phone and you want to redeem a coupon or offer, you may have to challenge the consumer. They’ve got to unlock their phone, find the app, open the app, get a network connection and pick up the offer. So we’re not talking about a very elegant, joined-up experience.”

Felix Marx, CEO of US mobile wallet vendor C-Sam, agreed that the customer experience of mobile in retail could be made simpler: “I do not want to have 35 different apps. I do not want to consciously decide what works in this store and what doesn’t work. Those are problems we need to solve,” he said.

“All technological problems have been addressed. Scalability is still something we need to work out,” Marx added.

Darrell Sandefur, director of digital innovation and R&D innovation at Luxottica Retail, also took issue with the complexity created by the plethora of payment technologies.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t think it’s going to get any better if we have 200 different mobile payment providers,” he said.