Mobile payments market cleanup attempt to be made by industry giants

Two major players in smartphone transactions have teamed up to boost the market – MasterCard and Weve.

MasterCard and Weve have now come together in a partnership that is designed to help the mobile payments market to clean itself up, smooth itself out and become considerably more appealing to merchants and consumers alike.

The scattered and inconsistent nature of the market is a major factor that is holding back the adoption of the tech.

This new mobile payments partnership is made up of credit card giant, MasterCard, and Weve, which is a joint venture comprising of the three largest mobile operators in the United Kingdom: O2, Vodafone UK, and EE. They will be working together to develop something altogether new and that will hopefully do what the market has failed to be able to provide until now.

They have described their goal of creating the U.K.’s “most comprehensive contactless mobile payments system.”

This is meant to help to create a contactless system for paying for products and services through the use of their smartphones and mobile devices, in a way that will be simple and convenient for consumers to use, while being cheaper to manage for banks. The role that MasterCard has taken on is to provide the system with the integration services and the technology to make it possible for financial institutions such as banks to be able to step into the payment platform from Weve.

Weve’s CEO, David Sear, said that this contactless transaction technology in the form of credit and debit cards has been taking off in the United Kingdom. He explained that there are currently 36 million people in the U.K. who are using this type of card, and that more than 300,000 retailers there are able to process this type of transaction.

Equally, he admits that paying over mobile devices using similar technology is “a bit of a mess”. He stated that it “may sound harsh, but it’s inescapably true; to date, the industry has created a level of discussion and confusion driven by a multitude of announcements that actually haven’t delivered mobile payments systems that works the way that consumers want and need them to.”