Tag: mobile payments market

The largest mobile companies in the United Kingdom are coming together to boost m-commerce.

The leading mobile operators in the United Kingdom are coming together once more in a joint effort to create a new approach to an industry wide jumpstart to the mobile payments market that has been struggling in the country.

There is already a surprising amount of competition in this market which has yet to prove itself.

The three major players in this mobile payments effort are Everything Everywhere (the joint venture between T-Mobile and Orange), as well as Telefonica UK (also recognized as O2), and Vodafone UK (also known simply as Vodafone). These three companies have announced that they will be working together for both transactions and for mobile marketing.

There is a rival competitor that is notably absent in this mobile payments partnership.

As this mobile commerce platform comes together, it is notable that the operator, 3, is absent in the mix. This is interesting because it will clearly be a factor being considered when competition authorities have their look.

That said, ahead of that time – if it does indeed occur – the players in this partnership will need to come up with a way of accomplishing what they are calling a “groundbreaking venture”, which has promised “to accelerate the development of innovative mobile services for consumers and business customers.”

This does have the potential of adding something different to the transactions and mobile ecommerce space, as it would provide one standard ecosystem that would assist retailers, marketers, and banks, alike, in communicating with consumers. This is a very strong trend, at the moment, and assembling it into a single standard ecosystem is becoming an extremely fashionable goal.

What will also be interesting to watch throughout the development of this partnership is the role that NFC technology will play. It has previously struggled in the U.K., and was abandoned outright by O2 only last week. Also undisclosed, at this point, will be the size of the investment contribution that will be made by each of the companies in order to be able to move this mobile payments startup forward.

Fraud is already rapidly on the rise in this sector which remains relatively limited, and it is only expected to grow.

When it comes to the adoption of smartphone based payments, one of the biggest concerns of consumers is mobile security, and for good reason, according to the latest data that has revealed that fraud in this area is a growing trend and it is coming at a considerable price.

The m-payments market was slow to get started, but it is experiencing some growth.

However, at the same time that m-payments are slowly growing, mobile security risks are increasing rapidly and are expected by experts to increase at a more rapid pace in coming years. This problem is expanded when m-commerce is taken into account, as shopping over smartphones has been taking off at a very rapid rate and is expected to become quite explosive over the upcoming holiday buying season.

A recent report has shown that the cost that mobile security issues is going to be a pricy one.

According to the Gartner technology research group’s projections, over the next four years, m-payments will experience a 35 percent average annual growth rate, which will send the number of users to around 450 million, and the amount of spending over this method up to $721 billion by 2017. In North America, alone, there is expected to be a growth rate of 53 percent, this year, so that by the end of 2013, it will have reached $37 billion, when compared to last year’s $24 billion. This is positive news for that industry, but also represents a growing mobile security risk as it becomes a more lucrative target to potential scammers and thieves.

All of the major players in smartphones and technology seem to have made their way into m-payments in one way or another, each with their own efforts to enhance mobile security to the point that they can make consumers comfortable with the tech and keep out fraud at the same time. This includes the acquisition of Braintree by PayPal, the new and improved mobile wallet launch by Google, and the addition of fingerprint scanning and biometrics by Apple.

Still, the primary barrier that all of those companies face is in mobile security, as consumers are still not convinced of the safety of their sensitive data. As many consumers are already quite comfortable with the payments methods that they already use, they are not ready to take a risk on a new and little known technology, when they don’t feel that their credit and debit cards are causing them an inconvenience.