Category: Mobile Commerce

Mobile payments at British banks called Zapp

| June 28, 2013

The United Kingdom will likely be adding a new smartphone friendly transaction service.

According to a recent announcement, the United Kingdom may soon be adding a brand new mobile payments platform to its offerings and will involved every major bank in the country.

When this comes together, it could be an important example for how financial institutions can collaborate.

The British banks will be working together for this mobile payments platform and may help to provide an example of how other financial institutions around the world can work together in order to make this type of transaction more widespread and to help to provide a more universal experience.

This type of partnership among banks can help to make mobile payments a lot more widespread.

Mobile Payments - UK BanksThe mobile payments service will be called Zapp and it was initially launched by VocaLink. That company is the collectively owned ATM and transaction network by the British banks. This will simply expand on the type of smartphone transaction service that is available in a similar way that other types of transactions have already been spread.

The Zapp mobile payments service will allow consumers to link their smartphone numbers to their bank accounts. This way, it will let these shoppers use their devices to send money in several different ways and for many different purposes. For example, it will allow everything from paying bills over smartphones to making peer to peer funds transfers.

The announcement revealed that the mobile payments platform has received funding from VocaLink worth £16 million, so far, and that it will still require an additional £100 million in order to bring it up to the ability to launch in 2014, as is intended.

Many different mobile payments platforms are currently launching all over the world, including in the United Kingdom. However, this will be among the first of its kind in terms of collaboration across all major banks in the country. The transactions have been very slow to take off, but it could be just this type of service that may make the difference to convince both businesses and consumers to adopt this cashless form of payment.

Mobile commerce is driving shopping behaviors

| June 27, 2013

The latest projections from Gartner have revealed that computing anytime and anywhere is impacting buyer choices.

According to the most recent forecasts that have been made by Gartner, mobile commerce is having a considerable impact on buyer behaviors and it predicts that it will have a considerable impact on the shipments of traditional PCs that will be seen from now on.

The report from the company showed that consumers haven’t slowed down their rate of spending.

Instead, the report indicated that consumers have shifted their focus toward mobile commerce instead of stopping the purchasing of the devices. It showed that tablet shipments will be increasing by 67.9 percent this year, bringing them to the point that 202 million units will have been sold.

This mobile commerce shift will occur at the same time that there will be a sudden drop in PC sales.

Mobile Commerce and shopping behaviorsThe considerable decline that occurred in laptop and desktop sales that was already recorded in the first quarter of this year is only the start of a trend. It is the result of a change in consumer preferences. They are more able to meet their wants and needs using mobile commerce instead of through traditional computers. This also indicates that there will be room made for new products that will be reaching the market shelves throughout the second half of the year.

The combined shipment of PCs, tablets, and smartphones, worldwide, are expected to reach 2.35 billion units by the beginning of next year. This represents an increase of 5.9 percent over 2012. The market is, however, being driven primarily by smartphone and tablet sales. To a smaller degree, it is also being driven by ultra-mobiles. PC shipments, on the other hand, were on the decline, instead.

According to the Gartner research vice president, Carolina Milanesi, said “Consumers want anytime-anywhere computing that allows them to consume and create content with ease, but also share and access that content from a different portfolio of products. Mobility is paramount in both mature and emerging markets.”

This makes it very important for businesses to begin their own focus on catering to consumers through mobile commerce, as this will be the device that many will be using in order to shop.