Mobile Banking Updates - Nov 7

A view on the trigger behaviour for mobile payments
"Dave postulate that widespread adoption of payment systems are triggered by change in behaviour of the population. He says (for instance) that the big move to card-based payments from check-payments was triggered by people that started travelling more frequently. Check-payments from foreigners were frowned on, but quickly got replaced by a plastic card."

Android Army Pumped for All-Out Attack on iPhone
"Soon, you’ll need more than two hands to count the number of Android phones on the market. At this rate, it seems inevitable that the number of phones running Google’s open source operating system will eventually outnumber the number of iPhones, which run Apple’s proprietary (and closed) operating system. It’s a situation that has many observers thinking back to the 1980s, when IBM introduced its PC and eclipsed Apple in market share by betting on open platforms. In the end, Apple was left with a respectable business, but a single-digit morsel of the PC market share."

Touchscreen Mobile Phone Adoption Grows at Blistering Pace in U.S. During Past Year
"comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study of touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S., which showed a significant 159-percent growth rate during the past year to 23.8 million users in August 2009. The growth in touchscreen device adoption substantially outpaced the already strong 63-percent growth in U.S. adoption of smartphones."

How Banks Are Looking to Become Serious Players in P2P Payments
"Electronic person-to-person payments have been around this entire decade, but they’re still largely the domain of specialists such as PayPal Inc. and a host of tech companies. But leading bank processors are getting into the P2P act, and if they’re successful they could spur greater usage from the consumer mainstream and confirm banks’ Web sites as go-to places for new payment services. Leading bank processor Fiserv Inc. this week unveiled its personal-payments service that will become available to the 3,100-plus financial institutions in Fiserv’s online bill-payment network in the first half of 2010. The service leverages the updated CheckFree RXP bill-pay platform that Fiserv acquired two years ago when the company bought bill-pay leader CheckFree Corp."