MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS shaping the future of payments and messaging

Many of you will have been out in Barcelona last week, pounding the Fira one last time before the show moves to the Catalan equivalent of the NEC out near the gas works and some of you may even have been caught up in the protests outside the main entrance/exit on Wednesday.

The demo was strangely fitting. The students burning bins and making me walk to the airport the long way round were in schtuck because the world’s banks f**ked up. Yet it was the banks that were on hand in the show pushing what, for me at least, was one of the key themes of this year’s show: mobile payments.

Now, anyone in the telemedia industry will tell you that mobile payments is pretty much our bread and butter. But what this year’s Mobile World Congress demonstrated is that 15 years of glacial negotiations and chatter between banking and network behemoths is starting to pay off.

In the UK Barclays Bank has already rolled out PingIt to allow peer-to-peer mobile payments to be made – and more tellingly have linked phone numbers to bank accounts and this set the scene nicely for what was happening in Barcelona.

Visa has tied up with Telefonica to let the network operator use its payments network to make mobile payments a bit easier (and lending its well trusted name to the process too, making mobile payments seem all the more legitimate to the banking public).

MasterCard meanwhile were also on hand to showcase how it too is working with networks, device makers and others to roll out global mobile payments.

But aside from these established names, everyone from Facebook and Google, through to mobile browser maker Opera Software were also waving the mobile payment flag.

If all the talk at the show turns into action, we can safely assume that mobile as a mainstream payment and banking tool will be the norm by the time the next mobile world congress comes around.

While a lot of attention at the show was focused on how the ‘old guard’ of banks and network are developing (finally!) these services, the other theme that got everyone talking was that of Over the Top (OTT) services and the way the whole network messaging market is being shaken up.

SMS is still the dominant messaging technology, but increasingly IP-based services that run ‘over the top’ of the mobile networks – using up bandwidth, but generating no revenue for the operator – are starting to grow. And the networks are worried.

Services such as Pinger are coming to Europe and, in the wake of Apple’s inclusion of iMessage on iOS 5, suddenly the messaging market looks very interesting indeed. Not constrained to 160 characters and increasingly moving towards delivering multiple message types in one box, these chat like IP services are gaining a lot of momentum.

Now, in Egypt the state has banned them to protect the interests of the national carrier, but this approach is not really viable in the ‘democratic West’ and so operators led by Vodafone were at the show pushing Joyn – their own IP based OTT like messaging services.

A battle line has been drawn and there is now everything to play for here. This is one to watch as it has huge ramifications for the telemedia industry: could SMS be rendered obsolete or will it move to be just a payment tool? Interesting times lie ahead.

Of course there was much more out there in Barcelona than we can do justice here, but the twin themes of payments and messaging are, to my mind, the two most crucial to the industry and I look forward to seeing how these things play out in the coming months.