Category: Telecoms and Media

[Dave Birch] Well, it finally happened. After sitting through literally innumerable conference presentations where someone from a telco refers to some spurious statistic about the typical person being more likely to forget their wallet than their phone, I forgot my wallet AGAIN. Perhaps this is an age related disorder. I filled the car up with petrol and when I wandered in to pay I realised that I’d left my wallet at home. Aargh! I did have my phone, but sadly the UK is one of those backward countries where you can’t use your phone at point-of-sale.

Technorati Tags: identity, mobile, payments

Continue reading “Phone alone”

[Dave Birch] This week’s podcast is about mobile payments. Andrew Bud of mBlox has been involved in the mobile payments business for a long time and this podcast captures some of his very well-informed thoughts on the next phase of evolution of this market. A co-founder and now Executive Chairman of mBlox, Andrew is also a Board member of the global Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), which he helped found in 2001 and to which he was re-elected in 2003 and 2005. Bud is the Vice Chairman. In April 2005 he was appointed to the Board of ICSTIS, the UK regulator of premium-rate telecoms services.

Technorati Tags: payments

Continue reading “Andrew Bud, mBlox”

[Dave Birch] Payments News points me to a new research report from the CFSI (not to be confused with our own CSFI: the US one is the Center for Financial Services Innovation, our UK friends are the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation) called "Mobile Financial Services and the Underbanked: Opportunities and Challenges for Mbanking and Mpayments".  We often discuss the use of the mobile phone to provide financial and payment services to developing markets (a technology-driven strategy so obvious that even management consultants recommend it) — and the overlap with other developing market financial trends such as microfinance — but sometimes forget that there are a great many people in developed markets who are not served by current finance and payment institutions.  I thought it might be useful to look at the specific financial services highlighted in the report.

Technorati Tags: banking, mobile, p2p, payments, remittances

Continue reading “Underdeveloped markets”

[Dave Birch] The Visa U.S.A. President  John Philip Coghlan has said that wallet phones are "inevitable".  And he’s right, as I have consistently insisted.  As a mechanism for retail payment, mobile phones have it over plastic cards: a card is merely a receptacle for the consumer’s data, whereas a phone can initiate a payment or accept on, can act as a channel for the customer and can manage payment-related data.  Bob Egan, Research Director for Emerging Technologies at TowerGroup (which is owned by MasterCard Worldwide) says that m-payments "will do for debit and credit card transactions what the iPod did for music": I think he means that they will make credit and debit card transactions available to all and easy to use rather than they will make credit and debit cards proprietary, under the distribution control of a third-party and unusable by older persons.

Technorati Tags: mobile, nfc, payments

Continue reading “Phones are better than cards”

[Dave Birch] Some unrepentant e-cash fanboy was quoted saying that "society will eventually end its love affair with cash and embrace technology – as in Japan where mobile phones, not bank cards, are replacing coins and notes".  It this a reasonable comment or techno-blinkered boosterism?  We need, as Aneace says, to find some figures on actual transactions performed with mobile phones.  Let’s look at Japan.

Technorati Tags: contactless, e-purse, mobile, retail

Continue reading “Competition for cash”

[Dave Birch] There seems to be no lack of enthusiasm for new mobile payment systems for use at retail POS, and we don’t need to rehearse the arguments why.  While my opinion is that they will have a mountain to climb as NFC comes into the marketplace, others think it’s worth a try.  In Belgium, Banksys is having a go.  Their new system, to be introduced shortly, will be based on encrypted SMS and Banksys claim that it will take no more than 18 seconds to make a payment.  (By way of comparison, the UK banks are targetting 500 milliseconds for the contactless payment cards they will be launching later this year.)  The Belgian mobile operators are on board, now they are waiting for the banks to join up.  There’s no chance that they will do it themselves, not just because they saw the comment by Iain Jamieson, country manager, New Zealand, Visa International that "The payments business is just as complicated as a mobile business. For telcos to try and come in without having a good understanding of the back-office stuff is a big step."

Technorati Tags: payments

Continue reading “Another shot at mobile payments”

[Dave Birch] Our friends at Payments News alert me to the news that DoCoMo and McDonalds have got together in Japan and created a joint venture of offer electronic payment services, initially to McDonald’s own stores.  I’m highlighting this one — amongst all the other mobile payment stories floating around at the moment — because is brings together two of the categories of organisation that can feasibly attack the banks’ retail payments business.

Technorati Tags: payments

Continue reading “Pincer movement”

[Dave Birch] Yet another NFC payment pilot is launching in the Netherlands, and this time the marketing people have got hold of it, so it’s gone green. Rabobank is going to launch a trial later this year to allow shoppers to both pay for purchase and store merchant coupons with their handsets. Rabobank and its mobile phone network unit, Rabo Mobiel, plan to launch the trial in the third quarter with partners including the C1000 supermarket chain. I thought that a nice twist is that shoppers get value added to their handsets for recycling empty bottles and they can deposit this into their Rabobank accounts or use it to make further purchases.

Technorati Tags: green, nfc, payments

Continue reading “NFC mania in home of tulip mania”

[Dave Birch] Someone after my own heart writes from Tokyo to say that as more deals are thrashed out to allow interoperability and a single contactless payments standard starts to look a realistic possibility, the Japanese could be facing a future where anyone without electronic money or the desire to embrace technology faces becoming a second-class citizen? "Ugh – real money? No thanks, it’s filthy".

Technorati Tags: mobile, nfc, puppy

Continue reading “Tokyo end-game”