Author: Rebecca

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.

Some 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.

The report on an index has indicated that the sales over smartphones and tablets have massively risen.

The IMRG Capgemini eRetail Sales Index data has now been released and it has indicated that the growth that has been experienced over the last year in mobile commerce has been tremendous.

The data compared the sales that were made this June with those that were achieved in June 2012.

What the Index noted was that the sales over mobile commerce had increased by 136 percent this June in comparison to those from last year at the same time. The index as a whole had increased by 8 percent in May 2013.

The research also indicated that there was growth in the mobile commerce conversion rates.

What the data from the index showed was that mobile commerce conversion rates grew from having been 1.3 percent in June 2012, to this year’s much more promising 2.0 percent. This is a tremendous increase in the conversion rate and will be a meaningful one for people who are selling over the channel.

A great deal of the credit for the increase in mobile commerce conversion rates was handed to tablets, which are becoming increasingly popular and are used more frequently by online shoppers.

According to the Capgemini head of retail consulting and technology, Chris Webster, “The mCommerce Index remains strong as consumer confidence in purchasing goods and services via smartphones and tablets continue to grow.” He also went on to explain that “The findings provide further evidence of the value mobile technologies have brought to the retail sector as consumers continue to shop via this channel.”

This is a strong indication that retailers who are not placing a notable focus on mobile commerce would be advised to do so or risk falling behind their competition who are becoming more appealing and convenient to consumers who are using their smartphones for a growing number of purposes every day.

At the same time that mobile commerce was excelling, overall online retail sales also saw a massive year over year increase, with current levels being 20 percent higher than they were last year. This is the largest growth that has been recorded in two years. The monthly increase from May to June this year was 2.4 percent and represented the first time in five years that there was a growth between those two months.