Tag: mobile commerce

Mobile commerce and payments partnership with ICICI and Movida

| July 25, 2013

The joint venture between Monitise and Visa has started a strategic deal with the Indian bank.

A new mobile commerce and smartphone payments partnership has now been announced between ICICI Bank from India, and the Visa and Monitise 50/50 joint venture in the country called Movida.

The largest private sector bank and the joint venture signed the agreement for smartphone friendly offerings.

Through this new partnership, ICICI bank intends to make new mobile commerce and payments offerings in a deal that has been compared to the one that occurred in 2012 between the same platform, Movida, and HDFC Bank, the second largest one in India’s private sector.

This will give ICICI’s customers the chance to take advantage of some of the potential of mobile commerce.

Mobile Commerce - ICICI Bank & Movida PartnershipSome of the mobile commerce offerings that the Movida platform will provide to ICICI customers include the ability to pay their bills, purchase movie tickets, and recharge their prepaid wireless accounts from their smartphones at any time, no matter where they are.

The Movida platform can be accessed through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology that is currently available in a number of different language (which is important considering the diversity in languages in India) or through the menu-based Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) GSM mobile protocol technology. The hope is that by providing these different mobile commerce options for access, it will help to maximize the number of consumers who will have the appropriate smartphone technology to use it.

ICICI Bank plans to roll out its new mobile commerce options later on in this quarter. It will be available to its payment card holders and will function across all of the different wireless networks through any payment credit card, including Visa, MasterCard, and a range of others.

In order to use the new mobile commerce feature, cardholders will need to link their card of choice to their smartphone number, which has been registered with ICICI Bank. They will then be able to make a payment through Movida’s secured connection. The card data is secured through the use of a unique, customer selected PIN which will be entered at each use.

Mobile payments will considerably impact retail

| July 25, 2013

A recent market analysis has revealed that smartphones will become a major game changer in shopping.

Though slow to get started, mobile payments could soon prove to be extremely important to the retail shopping experience, as consumers begin to feel that using the devices as digital forms of credit and debit cards, as well as for loyalty programs, is trustworthy and convenient.

This trend would dramatically change the consumer experience as everything will be contained in one place.

Though wallets are stored, locked away, or left behind, in various situations, the odds are that a person will always have his or her smartphone in hand or pocket. Retailers are already using mobile commerce to appeal to online shoppers who access the internet with their smartphones and tablets, and now they are beginning to see the potential benefit from receiving transactions through these devices, as well.

Some feel that mobile payments could be the biggest revolution in retail in many decades.

Mobile payments impact on retailA recent Business Insider report has stated that the “old dream of the digital wallet is coming true in a very mobile-led fashion.” The report indicated that by the end of last year, in the United States there were already approximately 7.9 million consumers who had adopted a system compatible with NFC technology (near field communications) or QR codes. These include examples, such as MasterCard PayPass, Visa Wallet, Google Wallet, and others that use apps for processing the transactions.

Equally, mobile payments through credit card readers on devices, such as PayPal, Square, and I Love Velvet reported processing transactions worth more than $10 billion last year.

Another report, this one recently issued by Gartner, has predicted that around the world, mobile payments transactions will break the $235 billion mark by the end of this year. That would be an increase of 44 percent over the figure from 2011.

When it comes to examples of mobile payments successes, Starbucks is typically said to be the leader as it has effectively implemented a range of different types of transactions, including everything from loyalty cards to QR code based purchases with a refillable retailer account.