So the team at FabriQate thought it’s best to discuss the real potential of Mobile Payments. Is it truly going to lead to the rise of the “Superphone” or does it just become another 10-year story that goes nowhere?

As teenagers, the founders of FabriQate saw the endless potential of mobile phones while growing up in Japan. They both knew that mobile technology would soon be our end-all be-all gadget. And Japan has made leaps and bounds here with the popular M-Mode. However barring the exception of M-Pesa (Kenya) and M-Chek (India) there aren’t that many success stories around.

The media and marketing industry has spent the last couple of years in anticipation of the full-scale launch of mobile payments. This year seemed to get us closer, with news of Orange and Barclaycard’s UK JV to deliver mobile payments, Google wallet’s launch in the US and O2’s impending wallet system. Another UK company called Monetise (whose Chairman, we recently met) also has been making some progress here.

Despite this progress, mobile payment is still limited in the UK due to the spend limits imposed (£15 on Orange and talks of £30 on O2), as well as lack of scale and too many different stakeholders and services in the market. All this was slowing progress but more importantly, it was inevitable that all these products were going to confuse consumers.

So FabriQate asks the question, what do consumers really want?

- Convenience
- Effortless (and natural)
- Consumers want to be able to replace their physical wallet with a secure mobile wallet (possibly using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology to pay for goods and services)
- Benefit from relevant offers and coupons, delivered direct to their phone

The latest YouGov mobile wallet survey backs this up, with the majority of surveyed consumers saying they would only use their phone for smaller ticket purchases. Also the operators recognised the need to invest in mobile payments infrastructure and had to face up to the threat of being overtaken by companies like Facebook, Square and Google in the mobile payments space if they didn’t react and work in a collaborative way.

In all – we think the wave is now. After 10 years + of deliberation, the mobile payments wave is finally arriving .. however the solution still needs to be refined or this wave will dissipate on the wave breakers!