mPayment will be the new consumer trend

mPayment – payment via the mobile phone – has created a new platform for mobile marketing in Scandinavia and several companies have already hopped on the bandwagon with the new trend. In the future, the mobile phone will be used as a payment tool in numerous contexts: on the bus, at the sweet vending machine, at the cinema – and on the Internet.

Your mobile phone is always at hand. But sometimes, having ready cash on you can prove a problem. And therefore, the mobile phone is an obvious mode of payment when you’re standing with empty pockets in front of a parking machine or a waiting bus and you need a ticket. The options with mPayment are many and there are such great advantages for both consumers and providers that at Unwire there are high expectations about the new mobile payment form:

“mPayment is the mode of payment of the future. It makes consumers independent of credit cards, cash and Internet access from computers and in itself, it creates so many advantages that we expect a large demand on the purchase of all kinds of services and products via the mobile phone in the future,” says Peter Bredgaard, CEO of Unwire. 

Scandinavia accepts mPayment
Several of the Scandinavian countries are already busy implementing mPayment. In Denmark, a couple of public transport companies have been among the first to introduce mPayment. There, a new SMS ticket purchase service for buses and trains has been launched this January in the metropolitan area. In Sweden, SL (Storstockholms Lokaltrafik) has offered Stockholm passengers a similar solution for some time now. You can also purchase Aftonbladet’s articles via your mobile phone in Sweden.

There are a great many opportunities, says Unwire, which estimates that mPayment will be particularly big within areas such as transport (bus, train, taxi), parking, vending machines (soft drinks, sweets), ticket sales (concerts, cinemas) and general retail trade – i.e. that you conduct an online purchase via the mobile phone.

Pilot projects will gather experience
Even though, in principle, mPayment has undreamt of possibilities, a number of selected projects will be initially implemented. This is because the telephone companies are interested in seeing how customers take up the opportunity to pay for their purchases over their mobile phone account.

“Some projects are already initiated. And since there is great interest in the area, we expect that in the coming months there will be more mPayment projects. Based on these projects, it will be possible to see in a year’s time the size of the customers’ demand and how they respond to paying for purchases over their mobile phone account,” says Peter Bredgaard, who has great expectations to the results of the initial projects.

He continues: “I am certain that the customers will welcome mPayment with open arms. This is just the first step – in the future we will be able to use the mobile phone as the payment tool in many more contexts and mobile payment will be a quite natural part of our daily lives.”