Why nearly everyone is wrong about Apple Pay

From news reports, you might think that the main use case for Apple Pay is contactless payments. Well, it’s not, says exasperated industry watcher Tim Green... Almost exactly a year ago, Tim Cook unveiled Apple Pay. He showed a video of a woman struggling to pay in-store with a bunch of plastic cards. Then he showed the same woman taking a second to pay by tapping her iPhone. He whooped: “It’s so cool!” with all the charisma you’d expect from a man who really knows supply logistics. But despite Cook’s almost hypnotic lack of presence, there was huge and inevitable applause from the …

Global Mobile News Round-up – Week 11th May

Verizon buys AOL for $4.4bn, Apple Pay in China, mobile ad spend to reach $105bn and more... Each week the MEF team curates mobile stories from around the world. Essential news you may have missed, the latest market insight & data nuggets, the Global Mobile News Round-up offers an instant international mobile content and commerce snapshot.  Global News Stories Verizon to buy AOL for $4.4bn BBC US telecommunications giant Verizon has agreed to buy AOL in a deal worth $4.4bn (£2.8bn). Buying AOL will broaden the amount of advertising Verizon can sell and will increase …

The Global Mobile Money Landscape – Updated

The mobile money sector is one of the most fluid in the whole of the mobile ecosystem, with more players entering and exiting, new tech and services being launched or trialed.  Here’s MEF’s quarterly update on the key players in the landscape. Defined by our Global Working Group it categories the ecosystem into in-store payments, online payments, P2P payments, direct operator billing, mobile wallets and mPos. MEF’s Global Mobile Money Landscape, is part of our regular Mobile Money eBulletin series, which you can download for free right now. Thanks to everyone who got in touch to share their …

Industry Views: Is even digital music ownership a thing of the past?

A recent report that surfaced in the Wall Street Journal indicates that Apple’s iTunes (the world’s largest record shop) is encountering a downturn in music & entertainment sales with a 13 – 14% decline from the start of this year. The irony is that this is probably because of a problem that Apple is in part responsible for creating: the ubiquity of smartphones and apps that let us stream music anywhere we are, from an almost limitless music library. In short we are moving away from digital forms of music and entertainment ownership, and replacing it with the subscription model. We …

The Global Mobile Money Landscape

The world of mobile money is an exciting but complex one. The sector has moved firmly into the mainstream with an ecosystem that captures stakeholders from innovative startups to established mobile payment companies as well as MNOs card companies, banks and device manufacturers.  New services are continually being launched and trialed making this one of the most fluid and dynamic areas in mobile. We’ve created a handy infographic to help define the key areas and players in the space. MEF’s member working group defines Mobile Money into six categories: in-store payments, online payments, P2P …

Waving but not paying – has Apple Pay put Weve on the ropes?

This week, mobile operator JV, Weve, announced that it was scaling back its plans to launch and support its mobile wallet just as Apple prepares to move in to the NFC enabled, wave and pay market with its iPhone 6 and Apple Pay.  With iPhones accounting for roughly one third of the UK smartphone users the move drastically reduces Weve's addressable market which the Centre for Economics and Business Research forecasts will be worth £14.2bn in 2018. Perhaps operators will focus their efforts on Android smartphones, yet Google launched its own NFC mobile wallet service in the US in 2011 in the …

Industry Views: Can Apple Pay finally make mobile payments mainstream?

The announcement that the new iPhones and Apple Watch feature the NFC powered Apple Pay under the hood has been in the making for some time. With some heavy-hitting partnerships revealed, this of course gets Apple in to the mobile payments space in a big way, both in store and online. Apple Pay sits neatly alongside the Passbook which groups loyalty cards with coupons and other retail items in a digital wallet. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is how Apple is working hard to differentiate itself from other payment services around consumer privacy. Unlike Google Wallet for example, …