Customer Experience Key for Successful Mobile Payments Scheme
Just over half (53 percent) of industry leaders believe that improving customers’ retail experience would be essential to creating a successful mobile payments scheme, according to the findings of SAP’s third consecutive GSMA Mobile World Congress survey.
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.
“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.”
Survey results revealed that key factors for creating a better retail experience include location-based point-of-sale offerings (24 percent), point-of-sale services such as near field communication (28 percent) and facilitating universal acceptance of mobile payments (25 percent). Less popular services include targeted offers based on consumer preferences and shopping history (12 percent) and integration with mass transit (9 percent).
The anticipated leaders of future successful mobile payments offerings include banks (29 percent); online payment schemes, such as PayPal, Apple iTunes or Amazon Payments (28 percent); credit cards (26 percent); or a consortium of operators (26 percent). This statistic diverged slightly from the 2012 SAP Mobile World Congress Survey, which anticipated banks (24 percent) and mobile operators (26 percent) would be important catalysts, but placed lower expectations on credit cards (10 percent) and online payment networks (19 percent).
The survey found that 34 percent 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 percent 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 percent believed that the lack of consumer awareness and too much confusion around the offerings were holding back mobile wallet services.
The survey was conducted on-site at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Spain, with responses collected from Feb. 25-26. The survey included 300 respondents, representing a cross-section of attendees, including mobile operators (14 percent), fixed telecommunication operators (12 percent), OTT players (9 percent), vendors (22 percent) and other mobile industry leaders (43 percent).