Vodafone UK & Google Checkout. Mobile Payments Company Boku Expands Direct Carrier Billing Deals In France. Today, mobile payments company Boku is launching direct carrier billing agreements with two of the largest mobile carriers in France— Bouygues Telecom and SFR, offering over 32 million French customers the ability to pay for virtual goods and services using only their existing wireless service account.
Historically, mobile payments companies face the challenge of lofty carrier rates. Wireless carriers have charged roughly 30% to 40% to process transactions made via mobile phone accounts, making it very difficult for mobile payment companies like Boku to scale beyond virtual goods. These transactions costs are passed down to developers using Boku, which are then passed to the consumer. To avoid these costs, Boku has been negotiating direct relationships with carriers as a way of possibly avoiding these costs. These deals give Boku nearly 100% coverage of the French mobile market, which is nearly 50 million mobile subscribers total.
Mobile First - PSMS & SMS Mobile Messaging Turnkey Solutions and Campaign Management Services. Mobile First Launches New Mobile Pay Platform | EngageDigital. Today the mobile billing firm Mobile First launched its mobile payment processing platform designed for use in online games, social network apps, and virtual currency platforms. Mobile First's solution launches simultaneously in 40 worldwide markets and gives merchants the ability to accept payment through SMS text message. "The global surge in popularity of social network applications, online games and other digital consumption has been met by a growing willingness by users to pay to play," said Kevin Spector, CEO of Mobile First, in a press statement. "Mobile First is focused on making the payment process simple, secure and reliable for both merchants and consumers. " Mobile First has processed $250 million in mobile payments since 2003, but its new platform is its first solution designed to help people purchase virtual goods and currency through microtransactions.
Mobile First will be exhibiting its new payment solution at Engage! Mobile First Launches Mobile Payment Solution For Virtual Goods Purchases. Merchants, are you tired of losing online sales because you only take payment by credit card? Mobile First, a provider of premium SMS text messaging services, just announced their Mobile Payment processing solution. Your online customers can now make purchases using their text messaging-enabled cell phones – a method that Mobile First claims has at least 8x the conversion factor, at least in the USA. Imagine a 65% conversion rate for phone-based payments compared to 7% for credit card payments, in the USA, and a potential 1.7B customers. (Consider that the number of Facebook users with a credit card is less than 20%.)
Merchants: Register and get approved.Receive a snippet of HTML and JavaScript code, to be embedded into a payment web page for products or services. Customers: Add an item to your shopping cart. Here are some of the pros for both merchants and customers.Benefits for Merchants: Benefits for Customers: Incomplete documentation. MicroPaiement 2010 - overview. Visa & PlaySpan. PlaySpan provides a Monetization-as-a-Service platform which enables vendors to monetize their content via a suite of payment and commerce-related services in fraud and risk management, analytics, merchandizing and global payment connectivity.
Via PlaySpan’s technology merchants enable their consumers to make purchases online for game credits, premium memberships and digital goods. Visa is expected to complete the purchase in its fiscal Q2 2011. PlaySpan generated USD 25 billion in consumer spending in 2010 and the sum is expected to increase to USD 280 billion by 2014. In a bid to extend its capabilities in the online commerce sector, Visa also acquired the US payment services provider CyberSource in 2010. Paypal goes live w/ micropayments. Will Paypal Launch Google One Pass Rival? With Apple and Google both launching (or looking to launch) payment solutions that aim to allow service providers to bypass traditional players, Paypal could be well advised to look for a solution similar Google One Pass. Paypal could leverage its 235 million accounts worldwide (more than Google's Gmail 200 million accounts) if it wanted to and launch an ecosystem that makes full use of the tens of thousands of commercial partners that collaborate with Paypal.
After all, Paypal, which is owned by Ebay, has a much larger commercial footprint than Google's checkout and could enlist a much bigger following than One Pass if it decided to launch a platform agnostic in-app subscription service. Users can already use mobile apps to make mobile payments via Paypal but this cannot be tied to third parties services the way Apple or Google plans it. To make matters worse, even mobile phone operators like O2 are considering becoming virtual banks in order to expand their revenue sources.