Tag: mobile banking

New report highlights the growth of mobile commerce across 13 countries

MEF, a global trade association focused on the mobile space, has release the first report in its Global Consumer Insights Series on Mobile Money. The report highlights the growing popularity of mobile payments across 13 countries. Mobile commerce has been making strong growth in many of the world’s most prominent markets. Much of this growth is being driven by the growing number of people that have smartphones and tablets and how much they are beginning to use these devices in their daily lives.

Report shows 15% of device users have made a mobile purchase in 2013

According to the report, some 15% of device users throughout 2013 made some form of mobile payment from their smartphones or tablets. The majority of these people made a purchase using some kind of mobile wallet application. These applications primarily leverage NFC technology, which allows digital information to be transmitted over short distances. Mobile wallets that do not make use of NFC technology are becoming more popular, however, as NFC-enabled mobile devices are still somewhat rare.

Mobile money users are becoming more important to businesses around the world

The report shows that mobile money users tend to spend more on individual purchases than others. The report notes that mobile money users are 10% less likely to make low-value payments and 14% more likely to make mid-value payments.  These particular consumers are becoming an important demographic for businesses that wish to engage the mobile audience, especially because these consumers are more likely to participate in mobile-centric initiatives, particularly those that leverage some kind of engagement technology, such as QR codes.

Mobile-only culture is beginning to emerge in developing countries

MEF’s report suggests that a “mobile-only” culture is beginning to emerge in developing countries. This involves people becoming more dependent on their mobile devices and making use of services that are only available through mobile platforms. Mobile banking, for instance, is becoming quite popular and a growing number of consumers are beginning to manage their finances solely through these mobile platforms. Mobile banking is expected to become much more popular than it already is as more financial institutions begin targeting mobile consumers.

The Reserve Bank of India has released a report that indicated that they had expected faster uptake.

According to the most recent Financial Stability Report from the Reserve Bank of India, the uptake of Indian mobile payments and banking has been promising, and yet considerably slower than had been expected over the span of the last three years.

The only banks in the country that can offer services over smartphones and tablets are those that are licensed.

According to the Central Bank in the country, in order to be able to offer Indian mobile paymentshttp://www.mobilecommercepress.com/mobile-banking-rise-australia/853413/, the institutions that wish to provide them to consumers must not only have a license from the Reserve Bank of India, but it must also be supervised by that agency. At the time of the report, there were 78 banks – including a number of them that are regional rural banks, as well as urban co-ops – that had been given the necessary permissions for offering these services.

Many are continuing to see a massive amount of potential from Indian mobile payments.

The Financial Stability Report claimed that using smartphones and tablets for banking offers people in India the greatest opportunity for financial inclusion that has ever been available. The report explained that “Helped by the rapid spread of use of mobile telephony, the growth in mobile banking has been encouraging over last three years.”

That said, it also pointed out that the growth and the overall acceptance of using these smartphone based services as a “channel for accessing banking services” has been much lower than had been anticipated.

Aside from the low awareness and adoption levels, there are also challenges in the industry regarding more rapid growth include the fact that banks aren’t capable of connecting bank account numbers with cell phone numbers, and there is a lack of compatibility between the apps and the devices that people are actually using in the country. There is also a lack of partnerships and models for sharing revenue between network operators and the banks, themselves.

Finally, Indian mobile payments have also been held back by the challenges in obtaining a USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) channel that is in operation for the purpose.