It is remote payments and not NFC that
provides the richest business opportunity for mobile operators, a
white paper commissioned by Vesta and compiled by Informa Telecomes
& Media found.

The paper, titled Remote Payments Drive
Near-Term M-Commerce Revenue Opportunity for Mobile Operators,
found that mobile commerce services such as mobile banking, remote
mobile payments, local mobile payments and mobile money transfers
would turn into an industry with revenues of more than $22.5bn
within the next three years.

Money transfer services alone will account for
$6bn in revenues by 2014 – a business case that presents better and
more lucrative opportunities than NFC, Informa argued.

Joshua Rush, vice-president marketing at Vesta
said:

“By driving the adoption of mobile wallet
functionality through prepaid top-up, content purchases and bill
payment services, operators can increase their subscribers’ comfort
levels with m-commerce transactions. This will enable operators to
position themselves at the heart of the m-commerce value chain,
ahead of over-the-top players and in pole position to claim a
significant share of the projected revenues.”

As is common nowadays, mobile applications
also provide a lucrative market in which mobile operators are
facing dominant competition from over-the-top (OTT) providers.

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Yet, there is ample opportunity for mobile
operators the report found as many OTT providers that launch apps
or app stores consider operator billing for paid-for
transactions.

“Therefore, operators can generate additional
revenues by enabling the billing and payment for third party mobile
applications, assuming they can negotiate competitive rates of
commission with the application store providers,” the report
said.

The report concluded that mobile operators are
“perfectly placed” to seize this opportunity because they can make
use of their existing business experience in prepaid charging to
develop airtime transfer services.