There are some things in telecom that always seem to be on the point of arriving. Outsourcing in Europe has been about to take off for about a decade. Roaming has been about to disappear for years now. It has been the year of mobile money for almost a decade. Everyone is making predictions about just how big the market is going to be – the latest, from Gartner via the Independent in London, says that advertising on mobiles will be worth $20.6 billion in four years time. This is how, apparently, the mobile money phenomenon will be funded.
The question is – why should we believe it this time around? The apparent arrival of mobile money has ebbed and flowed like the tide. Prototypes have been demonstrated and then put back in cupboards.
The early ideas involved actually putting a credit card into a mobile phone and then evolved into putting purchases on mobile phone bills, telcos becoming banks, telcos partnering with banks, customers choosing whether to add a purchase to a phone bill or a credit card balance and being able to decide whether to pay now, pay later, pay in advance. This was going to be achieved by SMS or WAP or a variety of proprietary solutions. A lot of money was spent on research, as much was spent on promotion.
Vodafone announced a solution some years ago, which disappeared and was replaced with Payforit which works for its online stuff. Last year AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile launched Isis, with Discover and then had to open up its systems to others.
In the UK, three out of four of the mobile operators have teamed up to make mobile money (mobile wallets in this case) work – at last.
This will be up and running by the end of the year.
“All” they have to do now is get regulatory approval, think of a name for the service, market it to advertisers to make it pay, ensure all the interconnect stuff works, test and then roll out the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, get the handsets made, market the service to consumers, train the customer service guys, upgrade those systems to deal with another complete customer conversation and the job is done.
Piece of cake.
Meanwhile Tom Alexander, the CEO of Everything Everywhere (the joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile) says that the customer expectations are already there.
It all sounds good – the technology is there, there is no reason that the regulator will object and apparently the customers are ready and waiting.
But.
High customer expectations plus very early hype plus new technology.
It does sound a bit familiar, doesn’t it?