Although the technology still hasn’t been made worldwide accessible, two players decide to stay ahead of things and make sure they will be leaders in a market with a huge revenue potential. Visa and Vodafone, two of the biggest names in their field, decided to enter a partnership on mobile phone payments.
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona made it clear that the smartphone market will get to know more and more producers as the technology develops and becomes a lot more accessible to customers. As more and more become aware that this mobile market holds impressive revenue potential, the technologies and producers involved grow by day.
One particular aspect in the market and technology development related to the matter are the mobile payments. Although the technology hasn’t been widely implemented or made available for customers worldwide, Visa and Vodafone decided to make sure they will be one step closer to becoming leaders in a market almost inexistent at the moment.
Basically, the new mobile payment partnership between Vodafone and Visa will bring the technology to about 398 million clients of the mobile carrier in over 30 countries around the world. Coupled with Visa accounts, Vodafone will be able to give its clients the option to make mobile payments that will be charged directly from the linked account to all Visa issuers and partners.
According to the official statement, the service will become available starting the next financial year, first in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, UK and at a later time the rest of the countries where Vodafone is currently active. Vodafone users of “stored value account will be able to make purchases at the-point-of-sale using Near Field Communications (NFC) enabled smartphones equipped with Visa payWave for mobile” read the statement.
Vittorio Colao, Vodafone Group Chief Executive, said: “the Vodafone mobile wallet represents the next stage of the smartphone revolution – it offers our customers the speed, simplicity and convenience of managing their everyday transactions” by simply tapping their smartphones.
Sarah Cordey, analyst at the British Retail Consortium, told Financial Times that deals as Visa & Vodafone are “an incentive for trials. We will be keeping an eye on how the charges levied by the banks for retailers that allow customers to pay with mobile phone develop in the future”.
