mcommerce is errrrm coming on

Met folks from MobileATM and Acclimatise today. Somewhat serendipitous connections between all, and mcommerce and climate change wouldn't normally seem obvious bedfellows. But on reflection they are points of comparison. Both are real pace-of-change totems in our society where we don't know if the tipping point has been reached, and won't know till some time after we reach it.

MobileATM, a joint venture between LINK and Morse, is the first vision of mcommerce that I've seen that could easily gain acceptance. It takes a market that is not too segmented by provider or banking partner, and puts the banks in the position of trust and lets them do the marketing - despite the best efforts of phishers, people generally trust their banks - meanwhile the mobile operators are returned to carriers, which on the whole is what they do best. Two problems they have though - the mobile providers still do some of the billing (making it not cheap to use), but more significantly barriers to consumer acceptance will be high because of the need for application installed on phone and multi-stage security requirements.

I think they will most likely make a success of it if the banks take more of the cost away from the consumer and/or partner with mobile providers to preinstall the application on phones.