There was plenty of tasty Kool-Aidtm on tap for Mobile Commerce geeks at the day long Mobile Payments World Special Interest Seminar on Monday. The session was well attended, particularly in view of the incremental fee, with representation from all corners of the anticipated ecosystem including banking, payment infrastructure providers, credit card associations, wireless carriers and a smattering of merchants. In hindsight, the extra fee was well spent given all of the information I gathered over the 8 hours.
First up was Willy Dommen, a Principal with Booz Allen Hamilton, to provide an overview of the emerging business opportunity and ecosystem. This was a basic, tone-setting excercise that was old news for many in the audience. He did provide an unconventional perspective on the distinction between contactless and Over-the-Air (OTA) payment systems by suggesting that it’s the latter that will represent the more mature and complex incarnation of mobile payments. This gave me pause, as I have been looking at OTA largely as an interim step until NFC readers become ubiquitous point-of-sale devices. Mr. Dommen suggests, rightly, that OTA will enjoy longevity as the technology to faciliate payments for car parking, vending machines, P2P payments and some forms of ticketing.
He also indicated that the clear opportunity for incremental revenues derives from the use of mobile to replace cash transactions as opposed to a substitute for card transactions. This potential is a function of interchange fees, time to penetration and degree of substitution as indicated in the chart mobcash.ppt.
Once illiterate, Brad Grau eventually mastered QWERTY and spellcheck although XML continues to elude him. He works in the wireless industry in a nondescript midwestern city. He is a keen observer of wireless progress and enjoys innovating daily and talking about himself in the third person.