It takes the average American six to eight minutes to realize they’ve lost their phone whereas it takes them some six to eight hours to realize they’ve lost their wallet according to Citibank’s head of global new product development and alliances.
Speaking at a GSMA roundtable on the subject of mobile payments, Citiban’s Dickson Chu said banks realized they needed to play catch up when it came to the mobile market, but that the efforts were already well underway.
“We are slow, we are bureaucratic, we are conservative, but we’re also trying to change,” he said noting that Citibank’s top priority was in finding a safe and efficient payment distribution system, which would make payments as easy as making a phone call, with the same level of trust and reliability.
“We’re still at the level of mobile network operator (MNO) led as opposed to bank led,” he noted, adding that this would even out at some point in the near future as more collaboration and interoperability between service providers occurred.
Bill Gajda, the global head of Visa’s mobile products agreed, noting “we see more and more banks coming into this now, but the pioneers have been the mobile operators.”
Both banks and operators have the ability to leverage their strong brands on the mobile payment front, he said, but banks will need to work with MNOs to reach the approximately two billion people worldwide who don’t have bank accounts.
“We’re trying to create something entirely new. It needs to be a very compelling proposition,” agreed Ericsson’s head of consumer services, Adam Kerr. The firm has just launched its own Ericsson money service which facilitates person to person cash transfers in a matter of seconds, but said “It’s very early days. This industry is still very much in its infancy.”
Carriers themselves are finding the road to mobile payments is also fraught with potholes, with Ben Soppitt, head of corporate strategy and business development at Indonesian operator AXIS, explaining that there were actually, to date, more unsuccessful implementations of mobile money than successful ones.
The rules, he said, were still being laid down, but the norms thus far seem to include not building proprietary platforms, working within current regulations and not assuming you know what your customer wants or that your market is the same as other markets around the world. “Assume ignorance,” he declared adding “We’re ignorant and we’ve embraced our ignorance because we want to learn. We’ll give them everything and see what they like.”
Dickson and Gajda concurred. “The customer owns the customer,” said the Citi boss, while Gajda agreed it was about giving more control than ever to the consumer.
