Hello and Happy Friday! With the M-Payments Summit and UK Telemedia Show just a few weeks away, it is interesting to see that our keynote speaker Juniper Research is predicting that there is going to be a boom in the digital content market between now and 2019. One of the key drivers is games, naturally, but the other is chat and dating.
Of course the only way these services are going to boom to this extent is on mobile and the money is only going to flow if the games companies and chat and dating firms embrace quick, simple and secure mobile payments. And that means Charge to mobile.
The chat and dating industry has long used carrier billing and seem a natural target for the growth of this going forward. Games too are starting to see the advantages of carrier billing – especially for in app games purchases – and so these two sectors are likely to be key drivers of not only the digital content boom, but also the rapid growth of charge to mobile.
The picture is very different, however, among many other sectors. While consumers are pretty keen on using mobile to pay, about half of merchants across all sectors have not even looked at how to develop a mobile payment strategy.
This is particularly surprising – and troubling – as not only are consumers looking to use their mobile to pay, but they are also looking increasingly keen to use smart watches and other wearable technology to pay as well.
This ground swell of consumer demand is going to drive more and more digital business, but only to the merchants that have a good mobile payment strategy in place. And that means having as many mobile payment tools as possible, including carrier billing.
And this is what we are going to be hearing more and more of in the coming weeks and months. And this is what the m-payments summit on 9 June in London is going to deliver. We have a raft of speakers from not only mobile industry, but also some of the pioneering businesses that already use charge to mobile – such as the BBC and Comic Relief – outlining what they are doing with the tech and where (wear?) it goes next.
Alongside this we are also running the Telemedia UK show which is digging deep into the regulatory side of things to showcase what the industry can do now PSD2 is nearly in place and where it all goes next.
So if you are a business looking to use mobile payments you can’t afford to miss it. And if you are a telemedia company you need to be there to tell your prospective new clients how to make it work. Sign up here
