Visa Gets Serious About Mobile Commerce - Will This Accelerate Mobile Commerce Adoption?

Following PayPal’s recent high profile and successful launch of PayPal for mobile on the iPhone, practical mobile commerce moved another step closer to wide spread adoption. 

Visa Inc’s approach to securing its own place in the mobile commerce space is to acquire CyberSource Corp, a long term provider of e-commerce transaction management solutions. The deal has in part been motivated by PayPal’s recent activities in the mobile payments space. For the industry, the $2B acquisition highlights the fact that mobile payments provide massive opportunities in the years ahead and that security will be one of the key challenges.

Mobile Commerce As A Separate Channel?

Currently, Visa sees mobile commerce as a separate channel from desktop based on-line commerce. This goes against the grain of many industry analysts who see the growing use of mobile internet as a potential threat to desk-top access. From a consumer’s viewpoint it is irrelevant. They just want the same ease of use and confidence whether they transact on desktop or mobile. For retailers, it might well be seen as a separate channel but only from the point of view understanding which channels are most effective at delivering sales. Their main requirement is to provide customers with a practical and secure mobile transaction environment.

New Opportunities For Business To Deliver Mobile Commerce

An increasing number of retailers want to get involved in mobile commerce but find it hard to do so. Navigating the range of mobile payment schemes and understanding the underlying rules, regulations and standards is daunting. Some retailers look at existing bill-to-phone methods and find them both expensive and restrictive. Others look at how they can enable users to submit credit card payments over mobile just they would on-line even though they accept that it is too cumbersome for consumers to enter the relevant data on a mobile device.

Visa’s announcement along with PayPal’s recent activities should give retailers who are serious about mobile commerce a cause for optimism. These players can ensure:

• Transaction fees that are much more in-line with retailer’s business models when compared to some bill-to-phone options
• Scalability both in terms of infrastructure and reach amongst the potential buying community

Consumer Acceptance

Consumer acceptance of mobile payment methods is of course key to wide spread adoption of mobile commerce. Solutions such as those enabled by PayPal and those created by the Visa / CyberSource tie-up will allow consumers to leverage their existing banking relationships and the familiarity and trust that goes with it. This will continue to make it more acceptable for consumers to transact on mobile so retailers more than ever before are beginning to have access to the correct mobile commerce enabling infrastructure.

Global CMO Survey: Digitally Empowered Clients Threaten Traditional Ad Agencies

Technology advancements and a radical shift in the way that customers engage with brands are creating challenges for traditional agencies. Whilst on the one hand the global economy starts to offer the promise of growth, a lack of appropriate skills threatens to remove access to this opportunity.

• Digitally empowered clients dissatisfied with agency online, viral and mobile marketing skills
• CMOs plan on more in-house skills development; less agency dependency
• Customer data management seen as moving up the agenda 

Digital Empowerment

One of the issues highlighted in the CMO Council’s State of Marketing Report, 2010, is that clients who have become more digitally empowered in recent years are dissatisfied with their agencies digital skills. Traditional agencies are struggling to convey to their clients that they can make channels such as mobile and social work. They are also not delivering viral marketing and are finding it harder to justify the online campaigns that they run.

Technology is the issue here. Creativity, branding and targeting have always been key areas of focus for agencies but mobile, social and online campaigning are driven by a combination of technology and vast amounts of customer data.

The rate at which technology continues to be developed makes it hard for traditional agencies to keep pace, leaving clients to bring in specialist agencies to the fill the skills gaps or do it themselves. Digitally empowered clients are also placing more focus on customer data. Specifically, how can the data that they have about their customers be used to improve campaign approach and planning? This highlights another issue with traditional ad agencies which is the lack of infrastructure or technology to manage the ever growing volumes of customer data.

Forward thinking agencies are already developing in-house skills or working with specialist agencies. However, it seems that this is not enough for clients who have started down the road of digital empowerment and believe that the best way forward is to increase their own knowledge, experience and technology assets.