Friday, May 26, 2006

Making mobile payments work 101

Little Springs Design an American based mobile design and usability firm have written a good starter on how the phone could replace the wallet. This is something that this week has become more important to my work with a number of developments.

The first was a mail shot from PayPal asking me to activate my mobile phone. Now I am not a big user of PayPal, as I do not have a big eBay habbit. Thus I have to think that the marketing people are expanding the offer to the casual user having seen a good take up by the regular users.

The other little gem that popped up on my radar was the developments of BT in launching Click&Buy for the wholesale market. With the service WAP site owners will be able to identify the users browsing their sites, this allows them to bill without using reverse SMS. The interesting element is that 60% of users of click&buy do not have a credit card.

The reason that these slow developments in mobile payments are becoming more interesting is that the Networks are opening up their portals to advertising, something that is already common in the States. Orange will allow agencies to place brand adverts as banners and text links, later they will allow content firms to advertise. When the content firms are able to enter the market then we could see more requirements for mobile payments.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello again,
That article you refer to talks about scanning barcodes from phones. Its been the subject of any number of user trials, but still does not work in the real world because of a number of fundamental technical issues relating to getting a consistent image delivered to a wide range of handsets....

Whats much more interesting for mobile payments in my humble view is the potential of providing a NFC enabled sticker that the consumer puts on the inside/outside of their existing handset. That could act as a catalyst to convince the manufacturers to make NFC enabled handsets and encourage the consumers to actually buy them....

Simon Cavill
CTO Mi-Pay Ltd