Day two of the Mobile Commerce Summit ran just for the morning (see Day 1 highlights), but anyone who overslept missed the highlight of the conference: the much-too-short panel discussion on revenue opportunities that started at 8:15 AM and ended at 9:00 (note 1).
Panel: Mobile revenue opportunities
- Drew Sievers, founder & CEO, mFoundry
- Joe Salesky, chairman & chief strategy officer, ClairMail
- Cameron Franks, director, Mobile Commerce Americas, Sybase 365
- Jayatsu Bhattacharya, SVP business development, Mobile Money Ventures (Citigroup & SK Telecom joint venture)
- Mustafa Patni, former director of mobile banking, WaMu
Observations from the panel:
- POS payment services: NFC at point of sale
- Value-added services
- Fees for mobile banking services: transaction, monthly, or annual
- Premium accounts with a rich mobile feature set
- Stock/investment trading (Citi Hong Kong is able to charge a premium for mobile trading)
- Bill pay: expedited payments
- Person-to-person (P2P) payments
- Much of the revenues will be indirect, from deepening and improving customer relationship
- Remote deposit capture for businesses
- Merchant advertising: offers to customers as they shop
- Loyalty programs: driving customers to certain merchants with alerts, offers, and discounts
- Lots of cost-saving opportunities: self-service customer service, moving bill payments to on-us transactions, loyalty program management, security, fulfillment, marketing, call deflection
Panel: Smartphone impact on the customer experience
Armin Ajami, VP retail Mobile channel, Wells Fargo
- Almost half of smartphone users use the mobile Web daily (source: ABI research, Feb. 2009)
- 18% of U.S. consumers have smartphones
- 263,000 apps now available for smartphones, predicted to grow to about 700,000 by 2013
- There are 27 different app stores today
- Mobile-optimized website <wf.com> launched in July 2007, text banking launched Oct. 2007, native iPhone app launched May 2009
- Funds transfer on mobile-optimized websites takes 2 minutes with 5 clicks, no zooming or scrolling vs. 10 minutes via iPhone mobile browser with 7 clicks, 5 zooms, 7 scrolls and 10 minutes
Alain DeSouza, sr. mgr., market development solutions marketing, Research in Motion
- Globally, 12% to 14% of mobile phones sold now are smartphones; in North America, it’s now above 20% (22% to 26%)
- Blackberry app store officially launched April 1, 2009
- Not excited about putting NFC chips into handsets (adds cost); will do it when it makes business sense (last year it was a top-5 opportunity, this year more of a top-20)
- P2P transfer is not a killer app, but could be important for adoption
- Be careful not to waste bandwidth in your app development
Note:
1. Note to conference organizers: Never start a session at 8:15 AM after a Thursday night in Las Vegas.