By Heather McLean
 
Mobile payments of the next few years will run on many different technologies, as competition to find the best channel to suit end users and the participants in the m-payment channel increases, according to David Eads, head of product marketing at Kony.
 
Kony, a provider of software to enable mobile business, creates pre-built apps for retail, e-commerce and m-health, and also offers a development environment for those that wish to build a custom app. NFC is prominent in all the verticals Kony is involved in, says Eads, yet it not the only one.
 
Eads notes: “I believe there will be intense competition around mobile payments because the stakes are so high. For example, electronic payments in the US in 2010 were $40.7 trillion dollars. Between $4 billion and $6 billion are at stake for every 1% of mobile payments adoption. This means that retailers are looking for opportunities to reduce their payment transaction costs. Bankers are looking for ways to protect their payment revenue. Carriers and mobile operating system manufacturers like Apple and Google are also looking for ways to get a part of this revenue stream.
 
“All of this competition leads to fragmentation. Many different approaches will be attempted because companies can't afford not to; before long, there will be a variety of different payment methods on offer, for example even just within different types of NFC offerings. The result is many companies and industries are going to be disrupted by NFC.”
 
He continues that for the foreseeable future there will be lots of m-payment technologies that will need to coexist, from barcode 2D technology, to NFC provided by carriers and by hardware manufacturers like Apple. “Each of those NFC implementations may be different depending on the business relationships involved in order to get that particular service working. It’s all about who is delivering the NFC, who’s delivering the mobile wallet, and the rest; it’s a vey complex ecosystem of relationships.”
 
Eads adds: “At Kony we believe that many mobile payments technologies will coexist for the foreseeable future. However, our recent research into the UK retail market, conducted by Vanson Bourne, reveals that although 42% of retailers understand that mobile commerce has already had an impact on consumer shopping behaviour, less than one in five retailers reported having a mobile strategy fully in place, and almost a third have no plans to implement one at all.
 
“Retailers must be able to adapt to any mobile channel that their consumers decide to use, whether it be mobile web on the iPhone 4 OS, an app on their BlackBerry, HTML5 on the Windows Phone, or any possible other combination of operating system and mobile channel; otherwise they will be left behind.”
 
Eads says NFC is in all the verticals Kony works in. He comments: “Everyone’s interested in mobile payments, including the health sector, which is looking to NFC as a means to do things like make payments, check in at the surgery, and transfer personal information at hospitals. But the main areas of interest for NFC come for the financial and retail sectors.”
 
Things are set to kick off when more NFC phones are available to end users, over the next six to 12 months, says Eads. “it will be extremely competitive, and our view is to facilitate this competitiveness by helping companies implement whichever NFC methods and apps they want,” he concludes.