Mobile Payment in MoMo Milan

The next MobileMonday Milan on the 3rd of April will discuss about Mobile Payments.

Experts of the business will present major M-Payment technologies

Contactless M-Payment:
Pietro Mastrototaro from TIM, who will introduce the revolutionary TIM Z-SIM/ Zigbee
Gianmauro Calafiore from WizCapital, who will introduce the widely used Japanese FeLiCa/ BitWallet

M-Payment solutions combined to credit card or bank account:
Francesco Fiandra and Marco Torri from YG/ CartaSi, who will tell about the case study of CartaSi Mobile/ Bankpass Mobile

The Mobile Payment Business:
A major part of the Mobile Payment services can be roughly divided into three different categories: Contactless, operator-based and operator-independent payment systems.

The contactless payment technologies utilize radio proximity systems, and are often integrated with mobile phones. An example of contactless payment systems are FeliCa in Japan, where it has become the de-facto standard method with over 20 million users, over 6 million FeliCa enabled handsets and POS (Point Of Sale) installed in all the major shop chains. Mobile FeliCa is owned, developed and promoted by the company Felica Networks, which is a joint venture between Sony, NTT DoCoMo and JR-East Railway company based on Sony's FeliCa contactless IC-Card technology.

Another contactless system is Z-SIM, unveiled in December 2005 by Telecom Italia Lab: TIM mobile phones will soon be able to communicate with any terminal or object (equipped with the same technology using a high-security protocol), by simply pressing a button on the mobile phone. Once they recognise each other, the two cards will permit mobile phones to run household appliances (turning on heaters, modifying temperatures, checking garden sprinklers, switching house lights on/off and managing computer files). In addition, the smart cards of TV decoders equipped with the new technology will permit dialogue with mobile phones that will become the medium through which to buy TV programs without having to connect the decoder to the telephone socket. The new SIM cards will also interact payment systems for movie tickets, parking and highway tolls.

According to "Research and Markets", the SMS mobile payment obtains the largest user scale and the highest revenue among various Mobile Payment applications: the overall user scale should record 97.5 million in 2008. However, if the contactless payment systems will repeat in the Western world their Japanese success, they will challenge the entire market to a tight competition.

The operator-based payment systems, which debit the payments to users' telephone bills, mainly consist of VAS payments such as buying MNO contents (e.g. logos and ringtones), and in some evoluted markets of microtransactions, such as buying tram tickets in Helsinki.

The Mobile Payment systems based on operator-independent billing usually associate the credit card or bank account to the mobile phone number. The Italian major credit card distributor CartaSi has recently launched its own Mobile Payment system. For example, during this ski season, CartaSi offers SMS services to the registered mobile users for paying the ski-lift pass with a mobile phone using the information of the credit card.

Another operator-independent mobile payment system has been developed by Kelyan Lab that has created the payment system for ATAC Roma: Travelers can buy single travel tickets with SMS by registering to the service, which connects the number of telephone to the credit card, and executes the payment from the credit card.

MoMo will take place in Milan on the Monday 3rd April 2006 at aperitivo-time 18.30 - 21.
Admission: FREE, but online registration is required.

Free drinks to the first 100 registered.
Register now on this site to ensure your participation to the event!

Reported by Emanuele Preda