Mobile Money
Last night’s MoMo London, hosted by the GSM Association, was on the theme of mobile money. There were presentations from Neil Daly of the GSMA and Paul Makin of Consult Hyperion followed by a panel discussion including David Birch from Consult Hyperion, Chris Thomason from Seren, Ben Whitaker from Masabi, John Lunn from PayPal and Andrew Henderson from the UK Mobile Contactless Forum.
Here are some insights from the evening…
- It’s possible to use consumers’ attachment to the ability to pay via mobile to reduce network operator churn.
- In the developing World, trust (trusting the provider) is more important than price.
- Mobile signatures (using PKI) allow the mobile to be used for other secure mobile services.
- Corporate interfaces such as salaries, social payments and payments are vital for uptake of mobile payments.
- Multiple ways of loading/unloading money encourage uptake.
- Think about your initial tariffs. It’s difficult to change them later and can end up limiting how the service can evolve.
- Payment is a small part of the transaction. Good user experience is vital.
- Operators tend not be driving mobile payment innovation. They are putting liability before opportunity. Instead 3rd parties are innovating.
- Paypal’s strategy is ‘payment on any device’. Mobile is just one part of this. PayPal is innovating by putting opportunity before (their) liability. They are willing to take risk and sort the bad people later. They can push boundaries due to their volume.
- Non-banks (like PayPal) can now be payment institutions (in Europe). They can access the payment networks without being a bank.
- There’s a problem of who consumers call when mobile payment goes wrong. Evidence is that they usually call the network operator despite whatever they have be instructed to do.
- In the future there may be possibilities for virtual currencies, perhaps based on credit within social networks. This might also cause new ways of money laundering and fraud.
- PayForIt in the UK is seen to be failing due to high fees. There will be a new PayForIt with single click payment much like PayPal and lower transaction fees.
- In the UK, fees need to compete down to less than 1% that large institutions such as train companies current pay for card-based payment.
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