Mobile

I talk about M-PESA and mobile financial inclusion a lot.  It’s high on the agenda of many governments and charities, most notably the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who claim that the world’s poorest nations will see an uplift in their wealth faster than any other nations over the next fifteen years thanks to mobile…

Reflecting on another conversation at last week’s conference, there were lots of discussions about why the mobile wallet wars were lost.  No one’s won the mobile wallet war yet, not even Apple, but it is there to be won.  In fact I wondered why it took a firm like Apple to take up the mantra…

At last week’s Payments International conference, Dave Birch and I engaged in a fun Oxford style debate entitled: This House Believes That Banks Are Failing To Grasp The Mobile Opportunity.  Unfortunately Dave got to propose the motion – we both said afterwards we could have argued either way – and, purely because a lot of…

Monitise produced a report six months ago on mobile usage, and have produced an update this week with some interesting numbers.  For example: 1,124 people use Facebook mobile every month (1,008 million six months ago [sma])  456 million people only use Facebook mobile (341 million sma) 85 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store (50…

So Apple Pay finally launched in the USA on October 20 and there’s been mixed reviews.  Some people couldn’t make payments, whilst some found they were double-charged.  However, these are just teething issues and the overwhelming reports are positive.  Even former Apple CEO and Financial Services Club keynote speaker John Sculley: I think Apple Pay…

I spent some time reviewing the latest news on M-PESA yesterday. M-PESA is now seven years old, and has transformed the African landscape.  Since its launch in 2007, over 18 million of the 43 million people who live in Kenya have opened an M-PESA account and access to the mobile network operator is 40 times…

I noted the disconnect between the bank community and the technology community sometime ago in my Red Pill moment, and as the year passes it becomes more and more obvious to me that we are going through a sea change in finance. Almost every day, I encounter a new start-up who wants to change some…

We’re talking wallets. Digital wallets. They’ve been talked about for a long time. Google Wallet was perhaps the first big launch but, since then, there have been many. Two years ago, I showed this slide from O2 on the state of mobile wallets, and said let the wallet wars begin: Two years later, the war…

Talking of how fast things change, here are a few Friday facts to make you smile (or feel ill). The UK Office of Communications (Ofcom) run regular surveys on our digital lifestyles. This year the impact of smartphone and tablet computing hits the radar and shows how things have changed fast. For example, this year’s survey…