Welcome to the new-look Electronic Payments
International, part of an upgrade of the product both in print
and online.
As you will be aware, EPI is now also
available through a more user-friendly website which features daily
updates on the main industry stories in addition to the analysis,
features and country surveys you are used to. The main focus over
the last month, both online and in print, has been the huge surge
in interest in mobile payments, which is our cover story in this
issue, and covered extensively in a special section.
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Mobile phones have been considered to have
distribution potential in banking and payments for the past 10
years or so, but nailing down the technicalities has proved
difficult. Now there are signs the big western markets are ready
for wholesale uptake of m-payment applications, following their
popularity in Japan, where around 17% of the population actively
make mobile payments, and South Korea.
US Bank recently became the first mainstream US
institution to roll out a mobile person-to-person payments platform
(see EPI.com), and there are indications that banks in the
UK – EPI understands Barclaycard will roll out a product
in the final quarter of this year– and in the US (see
Obopay changes tack on P2P payments)
are ready to make the leap into m-payments.
This is partly an indication that banks are
ready again to invest in technology, but also a recognition that if
banks do not take ownership of the online and mobile payments space
then somebody else – notably PayPal – will.
For really widespread adoption, however, at a
global level, the relevant infrastructure and security to make
mobile and remote payments needs to be in place, and it is with
this in mind that the recent Mobey Forum met to discuss a White
Paper on how this can be achieved. This will be a drawn out
process.
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By GlobalDataInitially different payment systems will need
to work out how they can operate with each other given current
limitations, but over time the forum envisages an environment where
remote m-payments can be made in agreed transaction formats and
shared standards (see M-payment ecosystems are a
must).
