It’s not often I get to talk about two of my favourite topics – expensive cars and payments – at the same time. However, there has been a flurry of discussion on the motoring discussion forums around BMW's decision to start offering subscriptions for services within their cars. While I talk about BMW here, many other brands are moving in this direction, so take BMW to mean many manufacturers in this context.

Subscriptions have been around for awhile, in some form. There are subscriptions for real-time traffic updates for example, though most new cars come with that bundled in. Those people buying older cars may not know that these are available, unless they have done their homework.

What has changed is their decision to start offering subscriptions to things that were previously either standard equipment (heated seats for example) or optional extras (such as heated steering wheels). I could – and probably would, given half the chance! – bore you with the consensus of opinions about whether this is a good idea, but many of the aspects fall outside of Celent’s coverage.

Yet there are implications for the payments industry.