I wanted to buy a cake for my little girl and Apple wouldn’t let me. Its failure left my daughter disappointed, me cursing Apple, and cost Apple’s ecosystem partner – the app developer – an in-app sale. Apple’s monopolistic choke hold over the mobile ecosystem needs to be seen as a brewing anti-trust issue and stopped. Nothing gives me more joy than making my daughter happy. So when she asked me to unlock different color frosting on her dessert-making app, I was pleased to do it for her. The problem was, Apple told me my
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On the face of it, you would be forgiven for thinking that the golden boy of mobile innovation had hit its first serious obstacle. Last year the gap between ‘mobile money’ and ‘plastic money’ narrowed continually as the payment providers rolled out some aggressive marketing to capture market share. Further pressure will be applied this year as Visa targets small retailers. Security and fraud will be cited as the main reason for the growth of plastic. With mobile money you are still dealing with cash. With plastic money you are not. The infrastructure that underpins
Read More »Direct-to-bill Mobile Payment is subtly different from Direct-operator-billing. Its a form of consumer behavior where the mobile phone is used as a payment instrument and charges are placed directly on a mobile bill, thus displacing debit or credit card purchases. BillingViews has conducted a preliminary survey of 500 US mobile users – all AT&T Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, or Verizon Wireless subscribers – to determine their willingness to adopt direct-to-bill mobile payments. The idea is very new, and technology is not yet widely available, if at all. Yet, our survey determined that 15 percent of
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Direct operator billing and direct-to-bill mobile payments are two different animals. Here’s a look at the subtle differences between the two models, why they matter, and a look at the initial results of our survey on U.S. mobile users’ readiness to adopt direct-to-bill mobile payments in lieu of credit and debit cards. Direct-Operator-Billing Is For Apps and the Like Direct operator billing entered the mainstream spotlight back in September when Facebook announced it would work with Bango to enable its users to charge their Facebook purchases directly to their mobile bills. Direct operator billing reportedly
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I’ve been obsessing over mobile payments and why NFC is allowed to remain a hurdle to their adoption. But now I think I’m onto something – it’s a conspiracy fomented by an army of devalued tip jars. No seriously, think about it. If you pay electronically, you receive no change, so you are less likely to make a deposit in that tip jar you so often see next to the register at places like Starbucks and Subway. Debit cards started the trend, but now mobile wallets threaten to make carrying cash even less likely. Once
Read More »Wireless bills tend to be extremely confusing. Despite the fact that bill formatting has made great aesthetic strides, people are still confused about what’s on the bill. A big part of the reason is that product descriptions that end up on a bill don’t make much sense to people. Telecom operators have been great at creating arcane product names that do a relatively poor job of describing the product. As we advocate for direct operator billing and direct-to-bill charge-based mobile payments, it certainly occurs that the bill confusion problem will only get worse. The partnership
Read More »Pandora Internet Radio has just announced that it will cap its ad-supported listeners at 40 hours per month in order to combat rising royalty costs. If you dig deeper, however, it seems the real problem is that Pandora isn’t converting enough listeners to subscribers. This problem likely stems from its user experience; Pandora gives you too many reasons to stop and think before letting you subscribe. It doesn’t do a great job of monetizing impulse scenarios that actually result in high levels of satisfaction. Direct operator billing could provide a way to help Pandora expand
Read More »Last week I made a passionate plea to mobile operators to take advantage of consumer and market lethargy in order to win in mobile payments. Since that writing, two events have occurred that have reinforced and added to those beliefs. First, waiting on POS upgrades is a waste of time, not only because being mobile means that people shouldn’t have to wait in line, but because making the POS more complex creates more problems than it solves. Second – though just as important – loyalty optimization might be the best way to drive mobile payment
Read More »Mobile pay chatter is heating up with MWC upon us. Too much of it is nonsense. All of the bickering over which mobile wallet will win is pointless. The argument that NFC has to be implemented across retailers for mobile pay to take off is tiresome. But there may be an opportunity for mobile operators to steal the show amidst this paralysis by analysis and circular debate. First, let’s just agree right now that the value prop for mobile payments has nothing to do with convenience. There are two things that will encourage people to
Read More »American Express is experimenting with Twitter as a payments (and loyalty) channel. The company has been rather quieter than its rivals, who have been associated with giant experiments such as ISIS, but they are busy innovating. An article from BillingViews’ friend Jonathan Jensen caught my eye, as he tracked his shopping trip, evaluating how mobile friendly various stores were. Being Jonathan, his first stop was Starbucks, where he paid for a coffee with the Passbook based Starbucks Card, which, combined with a Foursquare check-in, gave him £5 cashback on his American Express account. As Jensen
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