The website of Alex Kinch, live from London
Posts tagged mobile payment
Top-up your electric meter with your mobile
Jun 8th
Johannesburg-based Swap Mobile has unveiled a service that allows South African mobile users to buy electricity vouchers with their mobile.
According to ITWeb, the service is an add-on to the company’s existing Swap Wallet service. Once registered, customers can purchase electricity to the value of their choice with payment made from their mobile wallet or from a linked credit card.
Vouchers are delivered straight to the mobile, and can be entered into pre-payment electricity meters. Swap Mobile claims the solution does away with the problem of late payment, and the service is available throughout South Africa 24 hours a day.
Mobile payment users to increase 70% in 2009 – report
May 28th
Research published by Gartner predicts the mobile payment industry will experience steady growth, as the number of mobile payment users worldwide will total 73.4 million in 2009, up 70.4 percent from 2008 when there were 43.1 million users.
Gartner predicts that the number of mobile payment users will reach more than 190 million in 2012, representing more than 3 percent of total mobile users worldwide and attaining a level at which it will be considered “mainstream.”
“Momentum in the mobile payment market gathered further in 2008 with a number of high-profile launches of mobile money transfer services in multiple markets, participation of major global institutions in near-field communication (NFC) payment trials, as well as new payment solutions entering the market,” said Sandy Shen, research director at Gartner. “However, at the same time, security concerns, an inadequate ‘ecosystem’ and undefined areas in banking regulations remain challenges for mobile payment.”
Gartner defines a mobile payment as paying for a product or service using mobile technology such as a short message service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and NFC. It includes transactions that use banking instruments such as cash, bank accounts or debit and credit cards, as well as noncarrier stored value accounts, such as travel cards, gift cards or Paypal. It does not include transactions that use mobile operators’ billing systems, such as purchase of mobile content or telebanking by mobile to the service center via an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
“Mobile payment has very different user cases and impact on developing markets to that of developed markets,” Ms. Shen said. “In developing markets, together with mobile banking, it allows people to use financial services in a more-efficient way — and sometimes the only way — at more-affordable costs, and can greatly improve standards of living. In developed markets, mobile is more of an extension of the existing payment infrastructure that allows people to deal with their financial needs on the go and in a timely fashion.”
This disparity leads to the presence of different products in different markets. For example, many services in the U.S. rely on a full browser and credit card, but this won’t work in developing markets, as many people don’t even have a bank account or bank card. On the other hand, Ms. Shen said USSD banking wouldn’t be acceptable in the U.S. as mobile operators have never made use of this for customer services and users may find it very awkward to work with.
In terms of both number of users and transaction volumes, Gartner expects Asia/Pacific and Japan to maintain a larger share of the market through 2012. While mobile payment penetration in Western Europe is expected to rise from 0.9 percent in 2009 to 2.5 percent in 2012, and from 1.7 percent to 3 percent in North America; penetration in Asia/Pacific and Japan will rise from 2 percent in 2009 to 3.8 percent in 2012. Mobile payment penetration in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin America is also expected to exceed 3 percent by 2012.
“The most profound impact of mobile banking and payment services is that they provide the nonbanking population with access to modern financial services, giving them tools to improve their living standards,” said Ms. Shen. “For mobile operators, mobile payment can help attract and retain users and generate new revenue streams. For financial institutions, mobile payment is an opportunity to reach users who may have been previously unreachable, due to a lack of retail infrastructure.”
Ms. Shen said that overall, the market will see fragmentation in both technologies and business models, meaning that services need to be adapted for individual markets — even when deployed with the same partners — and that long lead times will be needed for deployment. This, together with the time required for creating user awareness, leads Gartner to believe that mobile payment is at least three years away from entering the mainstream market.
Where is Payforit today? Guillaume Peersman, UK MD, Dialogue
May 27th
Guillaume Peersman, Dialogue
A few years ago a handful of operators, aggregators and content providers got together and quietly launched a new payment method called Payforit. Two years on, how has it evolved?
That was the question on everyone’s lips at the aptly named ‘Where is Payforit today?’ seminar, organised by aime (Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment), which took place in London last Thursday. With speakers representing all three sections of the chain (operators, mobile services providers and content providers) – plus the promise of a no holds-barred questions and answers session, I sat poised with my pen and paper and settled in for an interesting evening.
First up was Guillaume Peersman, UK Managing Director of Dialogue Communications – a mobile solutions provider (SMS aggregator to those of us who’ve been around the industry long enough) and one of the leads on the Payforit initiative.
Guillaume first gave us an overview of Payforit. Launched in March 2006, with the first services going live in January 2007, Payforit enables content providers to charge up to £10 to a users post-pay or pre-pay account. Mandated by all the UK operators (apart from Orange, bizarrely) it can handle both one-off and repeat subscription-based charging, and can also be used on the ‘full-fat’ non-mobile web.
Other developments added to the original Payforit specification along the way include one-click charging, charging to broadband dongles, and the ability to charge not just for mobile content but other low value items like CD’s, DVD’s, tickets, etc.
There are issues though. Whilst one operator has opened up a £30 price point, the rest are still stuck at a maximum of £10. Incidentally these price points are fixed – eg 25p, £1, £5 – so you can’t charge for instance £4.99 or £6.34 or any other random figure. Consumer awareness is still quite low – Payforit accounts for around 8-10% of revenue for Dialogue’s customers compared to the traditional Premium SMS mobile charging method. And whilst Payforit is showing some growth, it’s still got a long way to go before it overtakes the established payment methods like credit/debit card and PayPal for low-value items.
So where do Dialogue see Payforit going in the future? Guillaume reckons it will replace premium SMS billing, be adopted outside the UK (Ireland have already shown an interest), see growth from non-mobile content and evolve into a more converged web and mobile purchasing experience.
“We need to get away from Payforit being seen solely as a mobile content buying solution”, he says. “The content market has levelled off and with the launch of web payforit new markets are being identified, such as e-vouchers, CD’s and books, thus widening it’s appeal and providing the consumer with another payment option using mobile billing, but more importantly reaching those buyers who don’t have bank accounts, credit or debit cards”. He pointed out that whilst premium SMS billing was launched back in 1998 it only really took off in 2002 as a charging method.
With Payforit only two years into it’s evolution, and with a positively cautious attitude towards making sure it isn’t tarnished with the same ‘scam and fraud’ brush as premium SMS was a few years back, Guillaume reckons the use of Payforit is set to grow in the coming years.
“At our last Payforit seminar in 2007, I predicted that Payforit would dominate m-payments for some time to come, but that it was by no means the finished product. This prediction has been realised with the introduction of Web Payforit and Single Click, however we still have a way to go in reaching our ultimate goal of making Payforit a consistent and recognisable brand for consumers across all WAP sites.”
Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll tell you what Rory Maguire, 3 UK’s Head of Payment Services, had to say.
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