On the money

This week I have mostly been hanging out at a payments conference in London. While it was obviously very glamorous, this particular event, put on by banks for banks and merchants and corporates, offers a great insight into how the ‘other half’ thinks about payments.

The event, which I have been going to for about five years has morphed in that time from being about remittance handling to squarely be dominated by mobile payments. In fact all the big sessions this year were about mobile payments. And some of the top speakers were from the mobile industry.

What was particularly interesting is that banks still don’t really get it. They still think that without them, mobile payments – any payments in fact – won’t work. And that they can still take their own sweet time in developing services that will be bank branded and they will in effect own the value chain.

But they are wrong. There are already myriad ways of doing mobile payments from good old PSMS, Payforit, through a host of third party tools, right through to mobile wallets, contactless payments and bank branded e-money schemes.

The key thing is that none of these alone will win out as ‘mobile payments’. They will all get a look in and will all be used by consumers to do different things. More importantly, the consumers will decide how they want to use mobile to pay for things and how they will want it to work. They will be aided in this decision by the merchants and brands who want their money. Banks, much like operators, will become dumb pipes.

The one interesting thing to come out of all this is that O2 is poised to launch its own m-wallet scheme in the next month that will be open to all O2 and non-O2 users and will, in the words of the Neil “lover” Lover, head of business operations at Telefonica, “is going to transform the market for mobile payments and NFC”. When pressed as to how this is going to work in a pretty much non-NFC world (does he know something about iPhone 5, I wonder?) all he would say is that “something very very exciting is coming with the launch of the O2 wallet”. Everyone thinks it will be NFC stickers, but we will have to wait and see.

And the place to find out more about the impact of mobile payments on media, brands, marketing, advertising, live events and commerce is The CONNECTED SUMMIT taking place in London between 15 and 16 May. Sign up here to learn from the experts how mobile is reshaping these businesses and the role mobile payments is playing across them all.