Other players dividing rest of the BENEFITS PIE. E-commerce taking actions!!!

There is a crowd of players in various categories of mobile payments, who hold short-term or long-term plans for making money and benefits through mobile phones, such as the mobile phone carriers, the credit card companies, and some third-party sluggers including PayPal and Google. Both of PayPal and Google gain profits either selling hardware, or through transaction fees and revenue sharing. 

Mobile Phone Carriers:

Mobile purchasing is extremely convenient for customers, and also mobile phones that have NFC chips inside can help with attracting and keeping customer base for mobile phone carriers. However, that's just one part of the equation. The Isis mobile payment network has already be formed by Verizon, AT&T, and T-mobile banding together, which includes an incentive element with deals and coupons. 

Credit Card Companies:

When mobile payments start catching on, consumers will eventually depend less and less on credit cards but more on the NFC chips in their mobile phones for approving digital deductions from their bank accounts while at a register. Potential business opportunities have been spotted that if Visa and MasterCard could give their mobile phone apps traction, they could probably keep money flowing through their own channels while keeping new contenders from dividing the market shares and revenues. 

E-commerce players taking actions:

The mobile space has inevitably become the hot spot for E-commerce players such as Google, Amazon, PayPal, and other online sellers with their own payment structure to extend their services and business. Amazon is considering its role with NFC. PayPal already has various mobile apps for peer-to-peer money transfers and PayPal will also be extending its mobile presence, CNET learned. PayPal has been one of the brightest spots in Ebay's financials during the last quarter, reporting a 28% increase in revenues in comparison to the previous year according to the statistics. PayPal is already well established in online payments, as online traffic moves to mobile, it sounds reasonable to assume that PayPal can keep growing strongly.

Here are two clips about how PayPal is dealing with mobile payments.

Speaking of Google, one report stated that Google has been working on an Android solution with MasterCard for mobile payments. It is betting strongly on the mobile payments industry with its Google Wallet product. This platform allows users to store digital credit cards information in their Android operated smart phones, and customers can pay for purchases at a store by simply waving their phone on a compatible reader. Some big players in food industry and retail industry like McDonald's and Macy's have already supported the Google Wallet. Citibank and MasterCard are Google's financial partners in this project.

Google is a dominant player in operating systems for smart phones with Android, and has many other services that could be integrated with mobile payments, including online search, mapping and advertising are just a few examples to keep in mind. 

Google looks strategically well positioned in this new industry. In the next blog, we will go into more details about the Google Wallet.

Reference:

1. Pushing Mobile Payments. Retrieved from:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203721704577156950263635424.html

2. EBay bets the house on Ecommerce, PayPal. Retried from: http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/2012/04/20/ebays-leading-mcommerce-strategy-helps-it-beat-analysts-expectations