Updated: UK Mobile Carriers Team Up For M-Payments Push [16Jun11] - 0 views
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Big news today in the world of mobile payments: the three largest operators in the UK have announced a joint venture to offer mobile wallet services to its customers, in the hopes of finally kick-starting a service that has been long on discussion but painfully short on execution up to now. O2 UK, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) UK and Everything Everywhere (itself a joint venture between France Telecom’s Orange UK and T-Mobile UK ) are banding together to form what they call a cross-platform, single solution. The operators say that this will create a simplified, one-stop shop for banks, merchants, advertisers and other marketing partners in the mobile payments value chain.
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And perhaps most importantly: with companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Visa and to a lesser extent Square looking to spearhead mobile payments with themselves in the center of the transaction, it’s clear that that mobile operators have decided that scale, and control of those all-important SIM cards, is their best weapon.
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“We’ll be customers of the venture, anyone can be,” explained Ronan Dunne, CEO of O2. “[O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere] have actually built and developed capabilities and we’re putting this together [and] creating a market for those who don’t have the scale to do it. The JV makes it easier to access this.”
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The JV will be an infrastructure for payments, but it won’t process any payments. This will be down to each operator, working with their individual partners, it seems.
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It also looks like the first products of this JV will be about advertising rather than NFC payments. Again, Dunne: “NFC is gong to take a little more time, but between the three of us we buy considerable amounts of handsets and [handset makers have] been looking for someone to put their hand up and embrace NFC in a big way.” On advertising, it looks like the idea will be to use the platform to launch campaigns, targeting the subscriber bases of all three operators. In both services, users will be able to opt in and opt out of services.