Hello and Happy Friday! With the summer over and the business world ramping up there has been a flurry of announcements around contactless payments – pushing mobile payments once again to the fore.
Research by Juniper Research suggests that 200 million contactless wallets will be in use on mobile by the end of next year and this is only going to grow more as MasterCard suggests lifting the £30 ceiling on contactless payments altogether in 2017.
These two things combined are going to have a profound affect on the up take of mobile payments. They are going to make them much more run of the mill and mainstream, as well as making them much more useful. They will also make the mobile the way to pay, hitting cash and cards more than anything has ever done before.
But where does that leave charge to mobile? Charge to mobile is capped and still, despite having the best business case in its favour, like, forever, it still has made little inroads anywhere outside the talking shop of the telecoms industry.
Perhaps I expect things to move too quickly, but contactless payments via mobile have exploded this year – admittedly after many years of hype and little action – but with Apple, Samsung, MasterCard and Visa now all well and truly behind it, it is set to become commonplace.
As ever the opportunity for charge to mobile rests with this mainstream uptake of mobile payments technology, but there is the ever present danger that these other technologies are going to steal C2M’s market before its even out of the gate.
The telemedia business was always one that was quick to act; first to leap on any new technology or trend and capitalise on it. This is now more imperative than ever, as the survival of the whole industry pretty much rests on building a charge to mobile user base. And building it quickly.
To do that, service providers have to pull out all the stops to convince TV companies, publishers, retailers, utilities companies and more that this technology is going to fill a gap for them and make their lives better. Everything else is in place. So let’s do it.
Not for nothing that Fonix and Impulse Pay are both in the Times Tech Top 100 companies: they are on the up because they get how to fit engagement and payments together – in theory at least. It’s now time to see it all in practice.
