Types of mobile payments

We have discussed how mobile payments has improved the lives of many consumers. Mobile is convenient, fast, secure and we must all agree that at this age mobile is every person's best friend. Research shows that the average person looks at his phone 110 times a day. What does this tell us about payment services and the mobile phone? With a zillion merchants out there who are offer goods and services, the mobile device is the easiest and most convenient tool for making the payments. 

With millions of consumers owning a mobile device, it becomes easy for products that add value to them to be availed. Emerging mobile payments trends cannot be ignored. In the developed world especially the mobile payments technology has made very big strides. research firm Gartner estimates that mobile payments will top $720B by 2017, up from $235B last year.

Mobile app developers are developing applications that will push consumers to change their payments methods and embrace the mobile way.

Imagine going into your favorite coffee shop and after that cup of coffee instead of reaching for your leather wallet you reach for your mobile wallet. Now replicate that to all the merchants like supermarkets, drug stores,schools and hospitals. You have an easy way of making payments straight 
from your mobile gadget.

Africa is rising and mobile payments technologies are advancing. One such payments option has been given to the Nairobi city council where city dwellers can pay for goods and services straight from the comfort of their rooms. They can pay using a mobile application for services such as parking, licenses and land rates. Also pay TV customers can renew subscription straight from their Living rooms.

Africa awaits with bated breaths for mobile payments to be enabled to more and more merchants offering services and goods. Recently Safaricom which is the largest Mobile operator with 20 million subscribers and 16 million mobile money subscribers hit the 3.1 Million mark smart phone users.This is good news for the mobile payments industry. This means that more and more mobile application to enable payments can be developed. What is likely to happen is a rush for a share of the pie that is waiting to be partaken. These are indeed great days to be living in Africa. Africa is rising, but more so in terms of mobile payments and technology.

Why Mobile Payments is the future

Since time immemorial people have always traded and paid for goods. It began with burter trading in the olden days. Then it came to payments by cowrie shells and precious stones. The longest mode of payments has been so far Cash. Different countries have different currencies for instance America with the dollar, British pound and so forth. Even though cash has been the mode of payment that we all in this generation have come to accept another payment method is fast coming into play. This is the mobile or cellphone payment option. This method is fast catching up. 

Consumers of goods and products can make payments to merchants straights from their mobile phones. The mobile phone has become a very easy and convenient method to make payments since majority of people have a phone. 

In Africa and specifically in Kenya one Mobile Network Operator, Safaricom is causing waves with its product Mpesa. Since its inception to the Kenyan market in 2007, the product which first started as a mobile money transfer service has touched the lives of millions. Now at 16million users the mobile money product has evolved to mobile payments to merchants. Millions of transactions totaling to billions of shilllings happen everyday. This makes mobile payments easy to merchants. The merchants are providers of pay Tv, utility providers like water and power. The list is endless as mobile payments can also be made to banks in terms of deposits.

This makes mobile to be the next frontier in terms of payments to merchants and transactions that involve moving money from one point to another.

 In the next article, we will delve more on the advent of smartphones and its direct contribution to mobile payments.