Tag: smartphone payments

Mobile payments are predicted to overcome their rough start this year

| January 7, 2013

Mobile Payments to overcome rough startThough there were a number of missteps throughout 2012, many believe 2013 will turn things around.

Last year, many of the players in the mobile payments industry had expected the use of smartphone wallets and similar services to take off, but the actual figures fell far short of the mark.

This year, experts in the industry believe that 2013 will represent a major turnaround in this area.

That said, the experts don’t believe that it will be Google, Isis, and the other joint venture mobile payments wallets that will take off this year. Instead, the attention is turning toward the banks that have been lining up to make their own way into the world of smartphone transactions.

This opinion is shared among a panel of 200 mobile payments industry experts.

This panel is made up of industry executives, insiders, and developers, who all share the belief that 2013 will be the year that is the most compelling for consumer mobile payments applications. They also stated that social networking and location apps will play an important role in the industry as a whole.

The results of a recently conducted survey by Chetan Sharma Consulting have shown that mobile payments and mcommerce will not only take off, but the power behind them will not be the traditional internet players. Instead, it will be the traditional financial companies.

According to the participants in the survey, they feel that Google, carriers, and the various popular new startups such as Square have had their chance to appeal to consumers and make it big, but that as a whole, they failed to make the impact that they had been hoping to make. Instead, it is the turn of the large credit card companies (such as Visa and MasterCard) and the banks and other established financial companies (such as PayPal) to step in and clean up the damage that was left behind.

It is those companies, said the survey participants, who will make the largest difference in mobile payments, and that will offer consumers the mobile security level and the type of services that they have been waiting to see before taking part.

Mobile payments receive considerable boost from Australian telcos

| January 2, 2013

Mobile Payments AustraliaThis year will make it much easier for consumers in Australia to make purchases using smartphones.

Telcos in Australia are giving a significant kick to their intentions to bring mobile payments to consumers throughout the country so that they will be able to use their smartphones or tablets to pay for products or services at a store’s checkout counter.

This could be the first step toward making credit cards obsolete within the country.

Although mobile payments are a move that has been in the works for several years and very little action has actually been seen until very recently. Even the most recent steps have not been enormous, and the term “contactless payments” remains unknown to the majority of consumers, even among those whose devices are capable of the transactions.

Though the contactless mobile payments concept has great potential, it has been failing to gain traction.

The idea behind mobile payments is quite simple. It involves using a smartphone or tablet that is either waved over an enabled reader at a point of sale in a store, or tapped against it. This automatically transfers the funds necessary for making the purchase from the user’s credit card or bank account, into the account of the store.

The primary barrier faced by this type of mobile payments is the fact that only a small percentage of smartphones are actually enabled with the necessary NFC technology (near field communication) that allow these transactions to occur. This was held back even further by the release of the iPhone 5 by Apple, which shocked the mobile world when those chips were notably absent.

Vodafone and Telstra believe that this year will mark a difference in this trend. They believe that with many more NFC technology enabled devices entering the marketplace, it will represent a brand new opportunity for mobile payments to take off.

According to Dr. Hugh Bradlow, the chief technology officer at Telstra, “It’s been promised for a long time, but by next year many devices on the market will incorporate near field communication.” He went on to explain that in the mobile payments marketplace, “NFC has been a slow burn, but it will likely become entrenched next year and we plan to be a big part of that.”