I was watching a presentation by Jan Chipchase that was given at TED. This talk was about how we interact with technology, specifically what happens when people share cells phones, an object that is actually designed for personal use. In describing how kiosks are popping up on the streets of Africa with little more than a mobile phone and a sign advertising call rates, he outlines an ingenious method of money transfer.
No one is going to use your new payments platform until a significant number of businesses or people accept the new method, yet no one is going to invest in the infrastructure to accept and handle the new payment method until lots of customers are using the new method. This chicken & egg problem needs to be addressed in any strategy, and the answer is often having a backward compatibility option that dissolves the problem.
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Verizon announced today that customers can Leave The Cash At Home – Obopay Will Give Verizon Wireless Subscribers The Option To Shop With Their Phones. It was worthwhile to actually read the press release to see how all of this would work.
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Aryty allows you to send prepaid credit to mobile phone accounts in the Philippines from the United States and Canada. This is a brilliant idea combining two mobile payment applications (mobile phone prepaid top-up and overseas remittance) into one.
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First there was Pay By Touch, which uses fingerprints to authenticate purchasers. Now there is Pay By Voice (actually branded as Voice Pay) which uses biometric voice analysis to authenticate purchasers.
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Netbanker, a great blog dedicated to online banking has decided to create a new, separate blog to track the evolving mobile banking and payments sector given the amount of material they are generating on mobile financial services alone.
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From a purely technical perspective, you can think of mobile payments being enabled via either hardware or software. The hardware approach is the mobile device as a chip carrier (like smart cards). The software approach involves a “virtual wallet” type concept that is accessed via SMS, WAP (browser on the phone) or a mobile software application.
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Targeted advertising on mobile devices has not escaped the notice of such heavyweights as the CEO of Google:
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I have been thinking a lot more about how Mobile Payments (”mpayments”) might gain traction in North America. Let’s look at some of the possibilities:
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I have often wondered, why can’t consumers also take advantage of a “positive pay” feature on their checking accounts.
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Payments are big business. Total industry revenues are over $200 Billion, almost double the revenues of the entire airline industry. Payments Watch provides insight and analysis on payments industry news from around the world.
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