Mobile Money and Mobile Commerce -is now the inflection point?

Back in 2008, I posted my very first entry related to mobile money by blogging about the rise of the mobile wallet here .

Progress has been painfully slow since then, both because of squabbling between the key stakeholders over who owns which part of the ecosytem and also because of the failure to address consumer concern over payment security.

It is inevitable though that mobile money will grow, both because of the increasing convenience of this payment payment (especially for the "unbanked population") and also because of changing consumer attitudes (electronic payment, even on mobile, is safer than carrying cash in your pocket).

Terrapinn produced this nice Infographic last month summarising the history of mobile payments from 1997 up  to today.2011 marked a significant turning point in the evolution of mobile payments with Google launching their Mobile Wallet, making payments simpler (See more in Google's video here).

There is a whole lot more to mobile money than just mobile wallets and a lot of talk is based around mobile payments, especially those using contactless or NFC technology. As Apple´s iOS6 gets set for launch and the new iPhone is tipped to be NFC-enabled, we will see a raft of new mobile payment players rushing to claim their stake in this space.

Sapient has produced a very detailed Infographic with some interesting background information about mobile payments. I have edited the graphic into readable chunks and you can see the first one below. Susbequent ones will follow in a next post.

Osaifu-Ketai: NTT DoCoMo's Mobile Wallet

I'd like to share an interesting presentation on the development of NFC contactless mobile payments as described by NTT DoCoMo in Japan during the recent GSMA Mobile Money Summit in Cairo.

The latest figures released show that the uptake of mobile payments has been dramatic, and that at the same time as the number of retails outlets accepting this form of payment grew to 600,000, so did subscriber numbers for the service, to 28,5 million.

Apart from the cultural factors at play to explain this successful uptake (tech savvy consumers, on-the-go lifestyle etc), key to sucess has been the succesful partnerships established amongst chipset manufacturers, handset vendors, service providers and Mobile Network Operators.

This has made mobile payments the payment option of choice for a wide range of transactions, from loyalty card point collection, to ticketing, employee ID card authentication and many more.

You can read more about this in the presentation by clicking on the title of this post.