CTIA: Mobile Payments This Years’ Zeitgeist, Visa Keynote

UPDATE: Just after I wrote this Visa put out a release on the CTIA keynote given by Visa USA President and CEO John Philip Coghlan. He spoke about the convergence of mobile communications and payments, describing it as “inevitable”, and said there needs to be close collaboration between the payment card and mobile industries. He talked about those collaborations — a strategic investment in dotmobi, an alliance with software developer Ecrio, convincing Verisign to support the Visa Mobile platform and working with Qualcomm and Kyocera to put it on CDMA handsets. He also showed the results of an online survey of 800 people which gave some unsurprisingly self-serving results — people want mobile payments, will pay more to have it and will switch carriers and banks to get it. I disagree — experience has shown that no matter what they say, the vast majority of people will just go for what they think is the cheapest plan. The last point from the survey: “By a ratio of five to one, consumers would prefer mobile purchases to pass through a credit or debit card network and appear on their card statement instead of appearing on their wireless bill.”

There’s a whole lot of mobile payments news coming out of CTIA this year. AT&T is working on a mobile payments system and PayPal got in before CTIA on its upgrade. Mobile payments company Obopay has announced the launch of its Obopay Mobile Merchant Platform which lets companies charge for goods and services on the handset. Mobile coupon company Cellfire has signed up to let its customers buy goods and services on the coupons via Obopay, and Xringer is using it to let customers using its MyShopper application buy what they discover there. (release)

Verisign is showcasing a suite of applications at CTIA, including some for mobile commerce. The Verisign Mobile Banking Solution allows access to banking services and information such as account balance notification, transaction history, fund transfers, bill payments and mobile alerts. Its mobile payment solution allows mobile purchases and peer-to-peer transactions, and its new Visa mobile platform will provide mobile offer management capabilities, like coupons.

eurotechnology is predicting that the number of “wallet phones” in Japan will increase to more than 50 million by 2010, mostly with DoCoMo. DoCoMo has a booth at CTIA, and BusinessWeek has an article about the Japanese giant forming a U.S. advisory board to be headed by Michael Powell, former head of the Federal Communications Commission. It’s a sign DoCoMo is going to have another stab at the US market, and while there’re several things it could do the most likely is to try and launch its payment solutions, which have taken off in Japan. “Japanese subscribers to DoCoMo’s Osaifu-Keitai e-wallet service can use their handsets to buy soda at vending machines, purchase airplane tickets, and manage bank accounts. Another offering, called iD, offers a secure way of storing credit-card information on mobile phones. You pay by swiping the phones across scanners. The charges are then added to wireless bills.” BusinessWeek backs it up with an analyst quote: “Can the carriers just coast on music and mobile TV?” says Andrei Jezierki, a founder of New York venture consultancy i2 Partners. “Absolutely not. Electronic payments will be huge.”

Outside of CTIA, in Kenya M-Pesa lets people send and receive money using SMS (psfk).

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