The service is expected to launch near the beginning of 2014 through eight participating financial institutions.
The Payments Council has just released their latest news for smartphone users in the United Kingdom, which revealed that in the early part of 2014, they will have mobile payments services available that will allow them to send money or complete transactions via text message.
It is hoped that this will be able to rev up the smartphone transaction sector within that country.
According to the BBC, the entire process will begin as the eight banks that are involved in this mobile payments venture ask their clients whether or not they would be willing to opt into the program in 2014.
The goal is to use text messaging to make mobile payments more accessible and convenient to users.
The participating banks feel that using text message mobile payments will provide a simpler process than having to transfer money in the traditional way, as an account number will not need to be provided. Instead, a phone number will be used, which is much easier for the user to remember and is considered to be more manageable.
Though this is will be the first time that a service of this nature is launched in the United Kingdom, the technology is not brand new. M-Pesa is already offering text based mobile payments in a number of different African countries. This is because it is available in the majority of cell phone devices and it allows funds to be transferred quite quickly.
The Faster Payments service will be managing the mobile payments of this nature in the U.K. In 2012, that company processed 800 million banking transactions, which suggests that they will be capable of handling the necessary volume.
It is expected that the users who will find the text mobile payments to be the most appealing will be those who have feature phones as opposed to smartphones, and who are therefore not able to load wallet and mcommerce apps. Also predicted to enjoy this technology will be individuals who want to use their devices but without having to manage their account numbers in order to do so.
Researchers are cautioning device users to be careful with the financial and personal data they share.
As mcommerce explodes in popularity, a rapidly increasing number of people are shopping over their smartphones and tablets, making them a natural target to those who would threaten their mobile security through malware and other malicious cyber attacks.
This, according to the researchers at Javelin Strategy and Research, who wrote a report on the topic.
In its most recently released report from Javelin, the researchers explained that the mobile security threats to the various payment platforms have already reached $20 billion, and they are on the rise. They explained that the smartphone payments sector’s open source platform at Android may experience some of the largest struggles as a soft target, with its 50 million domestic smartphone users.
The researchers pointed out that the mobile security threats will be far from exclusive to Android device users.
Equally, though, the researchers also indicated that mobile security threats are targeting the iPhone and its 33 million domestic users. This could be even more damaging as these are the individuals who have the greatest tendency to shop over their smartphones and who spend the most money on their mobile purchases.
According to the authors of the report “Smartphone security is an increasing concern as mobile malware multiplies exponentially, and Android’s open source platform continues to gain market share over iOS.” They indicated that while Android is the target of the majority of malware so far, as it has the largest number of users, hackers still consider iOS to be the most valuable goal, if more challenging to crack.
The report stated that “iOS users spend more individually and have greater deposits on average than Android users.”
The researchers expect that by 2017, approximately 57 percent of adults will own smartphones based on the Android operating system. This will be almost precisely double the number who are predicted to have iPhones, at 28 percent. This skyrocketing use of Android devices will align predictably with the type of mobile security threats and malware volume that the researchers anticipate over the same time period. This is not unprecedented, as the number of Android targeting malware threats increased in the second half of this year from about 30,000 to approximately 175,000.
