Tag: mobile applications

Banking organization releases new mobile commerce application

Standard Bank, a pan-African banking organization, has launched a new mobile payments application called SnapScan. Mobile commerce is becoming quite popular in Africa, especially as more people in various countries gain access to smartphones and tablets. The proliferation of mobile technology is having a major impact on commerce and the demand for mobile services is beginning to grow at a dramatic rate. In order to accommodate demand, organizations like Standard Bank have been releasing new services that are mobile-centric in nature.

SnapScan leverages QR codes to initiate mobile transactions

The new SnapScan service is meant to give consumers the ability to participate in mobile commerce through the use of QR codes. The application can scan these codes and initiative a mobile transaction. The codes can be associated with any sort of product or service and have become a very popular mobile commerce tool in recent years. These codes are quite easily produced and, in most cases, can be made for free, which is one of the reasons they are particularly popular among retailers and in the marketing field.

10,000 merchants in Africa accept payments from SnapScan app

Some 10,000 merchants throughout Africa have partnered with Standard Bank in order to accept mobile payments coming from the SnapScan application. These merchants provide consumers with unique QR codes. Once the code is scanned and a payment has been issued, merchants receive an SMS message that verifies that the payment has been received successfully. SnapScan may become more popular in Africa as more consumers make use of the application and see its merits.

Security remains a major challenge for mobile commerce

Many people favor mobile commerce because of its convenience, but consumers are also wary of the mobile space because of the security threats that exist therein. Security has been a major problem for mobile commerce for some time, as it is a popular target for malicious groups that seek to exploit financial information. If organizations can find a way to boost the security of the services that they provide, they are likely to find success in the mobile space.

The activities of applications from Google, Apple, and even Amazon are being examined.

American technology giants Google, Apple, and Amazon, as well as Gameloft, a game developer from France, are all being investigated by Italy for having allegedly participated in unfair commercial practices with respect to their mobile app marketplaces.

The allegation was made by the Italian antitrust and competition authority.

Now, the investigation into the practices is going to determine whether or not those four companies should be deemed to be misleading to customers when mobile app downloads are labeled as being free. This is specific to the applications that are marked as being free but which then require a player to have to pay a fee in order to be able to continue to use the apps beyond a certain point in the game or to unlock certain additional features.

The Italian authority feels that a free mobile app should never require a consumer to have to pay.

The antitrust watchdog released a statement that said that “Consumers could wrongly believe that the game is entirely free and, in any case, that they would know in advance the full costs of the game.” They added that “insufficient information seems to be provided to consumers about the settings needed to stop or limit the purchases within the app.”

Apple did not release a comment by the time of the writing of this article, but Gameloft issued a statement that it was conducting its own investigation into this issue, but had no comment beyond that. Neither Amazon nor Google could be immediately reached in order to obtain their response to this accusation.

An authority spokesperson explained that this investigation would likely take between seven and eight months to conduct and that if the companies are found to be guilty of the allegations, then the minimum fee that would be imposed on each would be €8.63 million.

This specific mobile app practice investigation follows closely on the heels of a previous one that was conducted by the European Commission earlier in 2014 which required companies to revise their rules for applications that can be downloaded for free but which then later require customers to pay for use.