Ericsson Launching Services for Mobile Wallets

Entering the arena of mobile banking, Ericsson will be adding Ericsson Money Services to its expanding range of managed offerings for carriers. This is not just a hosted service, but an end-to-end process that the company is set to create a global ecosystem that makes sending money person to person as simple as sending an SMS. Ericsson will officially unveil the new offering, which has been in development for 2 years, at Mobile World Congress this month and it will go live first in Europe and Asia.

Mobile payments are finally taking off, and all the mobile players want to control the systems that underpin them. A new market is opening up consisting of consumers whose first meeting with banks will take place over a mobile phone and who may never own a plastic credit card. People who may never enter a bricks-and-mortar bank now have the opportunity to walk into a virtual bank using their phone. They will also benefit from more reasonable fees for routine transactions such as transferring funds.

In India as well, we saw early signs of fast uptake of m-banking by domestic telcos. bharti airtel recently announced the launch of airtel money; India's first mobile wallet service by a telecom operator. The service will enable airtel mobile customers to use the power of the ubiquitous mobile platform to make payments the easier way anytime, sitting anywhere.

In addition to this new development in m-banking arena; globally also lot of countries are fast adopting this technology apart from emerging countries like Latin America, South Africa etc. France’s 3 leading telcos have teamed up to develop a mobile payment service to cash in on growing e-commerce transactions.

France Telecom, Bouygues Telecom and SFR are working with Atos Origin subsidiary Atos Worldline, a market leader in European secure payments, to develop Buyster and aim to launch the service in their domestic market by the middle of the year.

The main focus is mobile phone based payments, and the firms are working on a secure link between subscriber’s bank cards and handsets.

akankshas@cybermedia.co.in