More Flash than Cash?

[Dave Griffiths] Have the Mobile Operators missed the mobile
payments boat? Time was when the mobile gurus
would have us believe that mobile payments were going to be big, so much so
that they replaced the “e” in “e-commerce” with “m” for mobile. About 10 years ago they were convinced that
people would browse the internet on their WAP phones, and buy fridges (not just
fridges though) on the train on their way home from work. The only thing the mobile operators were
missing was a payment mechanism they could tickle. The same gurus who had thought that buying
fridges on trains was a neat idea, also thought that the mobile operators already
had all of the necessary payment mechanisms in place – because they already
billed their customers monthly, and because they already settled call charges
between themselves both nationally and internationally. However, there was a gap between guru perception
and mobile operator reality: analysis soon showed that the billing systems were
held together with string, the international settlements were based to a large
extent on fingers in the air, and the overall m-commerce proposition was more
pie in the sky than fridge on the train.

The brave new m-commerce dream soon became
little more than a mechanism for ring-tone purchase based on then concept of
the reverse charge SMS (which for consumers, fell into the same perception category
as premium rate telephone calls, along with all the associated mis-charging
grief). The reverse SMS payment
mechanisms did nothing to enhance mainstream mobile telco payment propositions –
and they were also associated with sub-prime businesses, advertised in the back
of tabloids. Other SMS mechanisms were
tried (linked to standard bank accounts as the mobile operators tried to tickle
the transactions by enhancing existing transaction security), but these have
never managed to catch the international imagination.

The mobile operators cannot deny that they
had a flying start. They had
relationships with each other, and they also had a technical infrastructure built
around the GSM chip that had the potential to bridge the card not present
transaction security gap – and since the number of mobile phones in use was
rapidly approaching credit card density, there would be no shortage of adopters. Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) also meant that payments
need not be restricted to the over 18s and the banked. The development of the PAYG infrastructure,
since it dealt primarily with value rather than minutes, could easily have been
enhanced to provide a card scheme type payment infrastructure.

Collectively and, to some degree,
individually, the telcos were in possession of everything necessary to build a
non-bank payment infrastructure – in an area that for the banks was still
pre-roadmap. And the banks were
pre-occupied; at the time they were working hard to put chips on cards, and
chip readers in terminals: they had no immediate interest in mobile payments.

PAYG, and the development of e-top-up vastly
enhanced telco ability to manage the movement of real money. Without a doubt, this gave them the edge; it
especially gave them the edge because the e-top-up cards were ATM compatible
and the transaction switching technology had also been adapted from existing
banking systems. However, PAYG also made
the phones accessible to the youth market, and sexy because of the
accessibility. The more mature phone
users still wanted a phone they could use for talking, and maybe the odd
new-fangled text thing. The younger
user, who by and large had little memory of the old world “dog ‘n’ bone” phones
wanted cameras and videos and mp3 players and radios and television and the
internet and MSN, and Oh! Yes, a phone too, so that their more pedestrian
parents could still communicate with them.

Phones that did stuff that wasn’t
particularly “phoney” inevitably caught the imagination of the designers, and
the marketers. With phone technology
riding the Moore’s Law wave, the designers were ever more able to squeeze ever
more features into ever smaller boxes, and the race was on to provide an
endless supply of phones to satisfy an ever expanding mobile phone market.

Phone manufacturers formed alliances with
multi-media corporations, as each recognised the other as a means of expanding
their individual markets. History has
shown each to have been correct – phone companies sell more phones and media
companies sell more media – and the telcos are still selling bandwidth: a
commodity product with limited ability to add value to the stand-alone telco
proposition. Multi-media corporations
and phone manufacturers are selling their products on the back of the high
availability, high bandwidth, transport medium provided by the telcos, and now
the banks are too. Contactless gizmos
can be attached, or built in, to phones that can talk to merchant terminals,
and congratulations go to RBS for recently achieving this significant
milestone, and thanks for showing it to me. The phone gizmo communicates with the existing bank payment infrastructure,
and the transaction just works! The
gizmo, however, is also in communication with the customer’s bank, and can be
topped up and managed remotely over the phone network – but the telco is still
just selling the data bandwidth and is still not in a position to tickle the
transaction.

The
mobile operators are still selling mobile toys: their market expands (or at
least generates new consumers) as new youth come of phone age every year. There will always, it seems, be a market for
phones that flash. It’s an exciting
world for the designers, for the technologists, for the marketers, for the
accountants, and for the customers; and it’s exciting in a way that mobile
payments aren’t! The mobile operators
had a period of grace from the time that mobile phones became digital to the
time when the banks and the payment schemes would catch up and apply their ever
increasing payment sophistication to the mobile phone. That grace period was probably in the region
of ten years, and it’s over!