[Dave Birch] At the M-Payments and M-Banking conference in Madrid there was a super presentation by Karin Huber on Mobicom’s experiences with mobile payments, ticketing and related value-added services in Austria. One thing that Karin mentioned in passing was that, in the Austrian market, it seemed as if consumers were using fears about security as a means to rationalise their concerns about mobile in general: they didn’t like registration and other aspects of the service. In a way, they weren’t really concerned about security at all. This factors in with something else I’d been thinking, which is that consumers don’t really understand security and they certainly don’t understand risk (all poll evidence confirms this in spades). Therefore, what consumers want is for their bank, payments providers and merchant to give the appearance of security, which is something different.
I had to phone up to activate a credit card recently, and when I called the activation “hotline” advertised by the sticker on the card, I was put through to someone who tried to sell me identity theft insurance. “Are you concerned about identity theft” they asked me. I said that I wasn’t, and the reason that I wanted a credit card was precisely so that if anything went wrong, it was the bank’s problem and not mine. This, incidentally, is why I never use my debit card except at ATMs. But after I hung up, I wondered if that is the right image to deliver to credit card customers. Isn’t reminding them that card fraud is massive going to drive them away from using their cards rather than reassuring them? Are there any psychologists out there who can help? If people don’t, indeed, understand security but are using it is a placeholder for all sorts of other concerns, then it is possible that the payments industry may be making some bad decisions about how much security to implement and how to implement it. Perhaps people might feel more comfortable using their mobile phones (which are perceived as personal devices) rather than dongles, widgets, passwords and PINs and so even if the actual security might be lower than in another device, the overall security of the system goes up because more people use them rather than wholly insecure means such as passwords.
As an aside, for m-payment nerds, Karin also said some very interesting things about Mobilcom’s decision to fold TSM functionality into the infrastructure. But that’s another story.
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