Posts Tagged MPME

Towards a collaboration strategy in Mobile Financial Services

Posted by Katia Hilal in General, Mobile Money on December 3, 2010

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

Posted by Katia Hilal in General, Mobile Money on November 22, 2010

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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