Strings attached to mobile wallets as SAP sees it

BARCELONA, SPAIN: New findings of its third consecutive GSMA Mobile World Congress survey, from SAP found that 53 per cent of industry leaders believed that improving customers' retail experience would be essential to creating a successful mobile payments scheme.

The survey is aimed at addressing top issues facing mobile commerce service providers and reflects the sentiments of mobile operators, fixed telecommunication providers, over-the-top (OTT) players and other global mobile industry executives.

Survey results revealed that the "secret sauce" for creating a better retail experience includes location-based point-of-sale offerings (24 per cent), point-of-sale services such as near field communication (NFC) (28 per cent) and facilitating universal acceptance of mobile payments (25 percent). Less popular services included targeted offers based on consumer preferences and shopping history (12 per cent) and integration with mass transit (nine percent).

"We are seeing a maturing of the mobile payments market, as we move from a service that is driven by person-to-person payments to one that must tackle the challenges of the retail environment," said Diarmuid Mallon, lead, Global Mobile Marketing Programs, SAP. "It is clear from our survey that in addition to improving the payment experience, mobile wallet apps need to support a multitude of services such as loyalty and couponing."

The anticipated leaders of future successful mobile payments offerings included banks (29 per cent); online payment schemes, such as PayPal, Apple iTunes or Amazon Payments (28 per cent); credit cards (26 per cent) or a consortium of operators (26 per cent). This statistic diverged slightly from the 2012 SAP Mobile World Congress Survey, which anticipated banks (24 per cent) and mobile operators (26 per cent) would be important catalysts, but placed lower expectations on credit cards (10 per cent) and online payment networks (19 perc ent).

The survey found that 34 per cent of the respondents felt that applications like Apple Passbook will speed up brands offering wallet services. In regard to changes in the mobile wallet, only 28 per cent of mobile insiders expected new ticketing and coupon services, such as Apple Passbook, Google Now and the Samsung wallet app, could become an alternative to true mobile wallets; and still, 38 per cent believed that the lack of consumer awareness and too much confusion around the offerings were holding back mobile wallet services.