Banks Need mCommerce For Chip Share
Banks wanting smart card market share will need to embrace mCommerce, says ESPCard CEO, Timothy Myers, who sees mCommerce quickly moving off smart cards and onto mobile devices. Myers, who expects plastic smart cards to fade before reaching critical mass, believes banks failing to be first-movers in mCommerce, "could lose the entire smart card war". Datamonitor's Anne Laure DeGove similarly notes bank reticence in the EBPP market to have enabled CheckFree to become a non-banking leader.Further threats to banks come from the SIMalliance, formed by several SIM card vendors, to develop applications for SIM cards in cell phones. At about the same time, MasterCard and Oberthur started mCommerce projects in seven countries, enabling consumers to use credit cards inside cell phones. But the underlying issue, according to Datamonitor's DeGove, is, "will it be telcos or banks that hold all the data and manage the transaction processing?"
DeGove makes a point in observing, "at the end of 1999, the world of payments was dominated and controlled by traditional players, the vast majority of which were banks". However, if wireless devices succeed as payment instruments, this situation "could change forever". In DeGove's view, the slowness of banks to deploy an eCommerce infrastructure increases the chances of a telecom firm snatching valuable market share that traditionally belongs to banks.
Related Links
