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Free webinar: The path ahead for mobile money and mobile financial services

Katia Hilal

Next week we are excited to be working with the team at Telecoms.com to bring you a free webinar on mobile money and mobile financial services.

Date: Thursday 10 May 2012

We will take a look at the lessons learnt from the first decade of mobile money and discover what will be the defining features of the second wave of deployments.

At this point in the journey, the focus is on collaboration and practical implementations of technology. It is essential take into account not just the emerging and the developed markets but the substantial middle ground. In this space the focus is on bridging mobility and financial services to bring useful applications to vertical markets; government, corporate, insurance, retail, microfinance.

Click here to register now for this free webinar.

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Evolving Mobile Money: Interview from MWC2012

Katia Hilal

Click on the link below to view the interview conducted by Telecoms.com with the eServGlobal team recently at Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona.

Evolving Mobile Money: Interview from MWC2012

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MWC 2011

Chris Woodhams

So here we are at MWC 2011 (same booth as always Hall8 Stand A69) – after a somewhat subdued event in 2010, there is a real buzz again this year and you can really tell where the industry is headed:

1.  Lots of interest in Mobile Money – the attitude of the operator family now seems to be ‘Here are the problems for us in Mobile Money – solve it and we can buy!’ (a great improvement on previous events where lots of brochures are taken but no real action in any direction).

2.  ANDROID is here and growing fast!  Its the last day – fewer people but you still cannot move on the Android pavilion!

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Did you know … ?

Christina Tubb

The first commercial text message was sent in December 1992.
Today the number of text messages sent everyday, exceeds the total population of the planet.

Here is a great 5 min video on the progression of technology.
Not the latest info (2008 I believe) but still interesting food for thought.

So what does it all mean … ? That’s what we get to decide.

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Towards a collaboration strategy in Mobile Financial Services

Katia Hilal

The recent announcements about Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to unite to offer a single standard for mobile commerce services in the U.S. (Isis) confirm the trend that is seen in developed countries. Where the banking system is already widespread and the users used to inter-operable payment systems such as checks and credit cards, the mobile operators need to get together and coordinate their strategies to be able to break into the payments market.

This has also been seen in France where the three Mobile Operators Orange, SFR and Bouygues have launched together their MPME Micro Payment service whereby users can pay for digital content with their prepaid credit or on their postpaid bill.

This is not the case in emerging countries where mobile payment is seen as the first financial service that the unbanked populations are having access to. In this context every operator is competing to be the dominant provider ending-up with multiple non inter-operable systems in place.

We will eventually see a convergence when operators in emerging countries come to some sort of maturity in this space… It will be interesting to see what it will be end-up looking like and what opportunities this convergence will generate.

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Mobile Payments: Trust and User Experience are the keywords

Katia Hilal

In the recent Buzzness Mobile event in Paris, operators and key industry players agreed that the two key factors to the success of mobile payment in France will be trust and user experience.

Trust is extremely important in all services requiring pre-registration of credit card details, as in the creation of a mobile wallet, like the iTunes account for the iPhone.  Here, the operator name, as for Apple in the iTunes example, is the guarantor or a secure service.

Another security element is added when the transaction amounts are limited to a certain threshold: in France, paying for content on the postpaid telephony bill or from the prepaid credit is limited to 8 Euros per transaction or 3 Euros per week for subscription-based services.

Finally, the payment confirmation process via SMS brings additional security and feeling of trust to the user.

As for the user experience, a maximum of two clicks/SMS seems to be the rule, with links inside the SMS to click on instead of a tedious SMS syntax.

Payment from a pre-authorized mobile wallet offers the best user experience with this respect. In payments on the postpaid bill or from the prepaid credit, the user experience should be simplified to the minimum allowing the payment to be secured and the user experience to be simple.

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