More mobile phone operators are throwing down
the gauntlet to alternative payment providers, revealing plans to
rival players such as PayPal and Google.
According to the Financial Times,
customers of three of France’s mobile phone operators – Orange,
Bouygues Telecom and SFR – will be able to pay for goods and
services via an online payments service, Buyster. The service is
expected to launch during the middle of 2011 and works by linking a
mobile phone number to a bank card.
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“We want to become the leader in mobile
distance payments and number two in fixed internet in France,” Eric
Gontier, CEO of Buyster told French newspaper Les
Echos.
Laurent Bailly, head of marketing at Buyster
told the FT the service will operate in France but could
be expanded across Europe through a license agreement.
Across the channel, O2 UK is also looking to
break into the payments space and is set to introduce a mobile
wallet app in the second half of the year. Contactless payments
using near-field communication (NFC) technology is also expected to
be added to the service by the end of the year.
James Le Brocq, head of O2’s financial
services division, spoke with technology website Silicon.com and
said the operator predicts that multiple payment services will
reside within the app, including a shopping service for browsing
and buying physical goods, mobile money transfers and top-up
options, which could be extended to bill payments.
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By GlobalData“Contactless is just part and parcel of what
the O2 wallet is all about,” Le Brocq told Silicon.com.
“I’m going to provision a load of services in
the second half of this year, which when the time is right, we will
also make contactless.
“Already we are seeing very clear trends in
the use of mobile phones for mobile commerce – to view retailers’
websites, to do price and comparison…and increasingly, we are
seeing a trend towards the use of the mobile device as part and
parcel of the payment process for the products you want to
buy.”
Le Brocq has noted that although smartphones
are playing an increasingly important role in consumer’s shopping
behaviour, paying for goods using mobiles can be “clunky” and is
therefore one of the areas O2 will be keen to transform.
