[Dave Birch] I’ve been reading an interesting paper by Jan Ondrus at HEC Lausanne about technology foresight. His multi-user, multi-criteria approach maps the criteria applied by different stakeholders and their evaluation of new technology. If I’ve understood correctly — and I may not have — it recognises that technology adoption is driven by groups of stakeholders (eg, banks and telcos) rather than by any one group alone, because everything is interconnected today. The reason I was looking at it relates to some work we are doing for a client concerning new NFC-based mobile applications, and Jan happens to use the combination of smart cards, contactless cards and NFC as a specific example (albeit limited to Switzerland) with a large set of stakeholders: banks, mobile operators, retailers, IT suppliers, transit systems and so on.

Technorati Tags: contactless, mobile, nfc

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] Yet more new payment mechanisms. In the U.K., the Post Office has already launched an electronic money transfer service which enables recipients to receive funds via a barcode sent to a mobile phone or e-mail address. The “Payout Service” allows companies to distribute cash payments at a fraction of the cost of issuing cheques, the Post Office says. Bascially, companies send a barcode by text, e-mail or post to the recipient. This barcode can be scanned at any Post Office branch counter, and the recipient receives an instant cash payment. It might be worth printing out a few random barcodes and going down to the Post Office to see if any of them are worth anything — sort of like a lottery, but more fun and available at 14,000 Post Office branches in the U.K. There must be more to it, because British Gas and Unilever liked the pilot and plan to extend their use of it. Unilever used it for fulfillment of a promotion for one of its products to 22,000 customers. Joanna Weston, a Unilever direct communication executive, says:

We didn’t have a clear fulfillment process in place to make a large quantity of small payments to our customers… This could have been problematic for us, as raising a cheque is 600 percent more expensive than using the Post Office Payout service.

For people like me who can’t even be bothered to go down to the Post Office office, there’s Obopay’s AOL instant messenger plugin, enabling you to make payments directly from your AIM Buddy List. The Obopay AIM plugin is accessible via your desktop or your mobile phone, so no matter where you are, you can access your Obopay account using AIM. Since Obopay comes with a pre-paid MasterCard, this means that one of your buddies can send you cash via AIM and then you can go spend it using the card. I’ll see if I can find out what the charges are so we can compare it with Post Office barcodes.

Technorati Tags: mobile, payments, prepaid, retail

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] I gave a talk to executives at a financial services company, focusing on the relationship between banks and mobile operators. In the payments world, technology is pushing this relationship back up the agenda. In Japan, remember, they’re getting over the co-operation issue by getting in to bed together. KDDI Corporation and Mitsubishi-Tokyo-UFJ Bank have created a joint venture — the “Mobile Net Bank Development Corporation”, MNBDC — in preparation for the two companies to launch a mobile-centric bank, Shinginko (which just means “new bank” in Japanese). MNBDC has already started building the systems for the New Bank and, subject to regulatory approval, products and services will be offered to the public soon. The idea of Shinginko is to offer a full line-up of financial services to individual consumers, capitalising on the strengths of the mobile phone as a channel using operator expertise. We once did some work for a UK joint venture like this but it never went anywhere because the goals of the bank and the operator were too divergent. Perhaps in Japan, and with a few more years experience, it will be different. There is certainly an appetite for mobile banking in the region. As Ericson Chan, group head of systems development for consumer banking at Standard Chartered Bank, boted recently, although many of the bank’s current customers may not be comfortable with using smartphones to make payments, the next generation of consumers are apt at doing so. Banks aren’t the only option for operators looking for partners to expand payments services: in Italy, Vodafone has joined forces with Poste Italiana, home of the prepaid scheme that we look at from time to time. Poste Italiana sees scope to link up the new MVNO customers with electronic payment cards, for which the post has 9 million customers, allowing customers to make payments using their mobile phones. Mobile phones can be filled up with 200 or 500 euros of credit, which can then be spent in retail outlets. I’m not sure whether customers would really want to use SIM-based services for this kind of thing so it’s not transparently obvious that this side of the venture will be successfull. When the NFC handsets come along though, this could be big.

Technorati Tags: banking, mobile, payments

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.