In 2007, the Smart Card Alliance Contactless Payment Council published its white paper on proximity mobile payments1 in which the opening statement was, "The convergence of payments and mobile communications is not just logical—it is inevitable."

The purpose of their report was to look further at the journey towards the "inevitable" by examining the progress being made to define a sustainable business model. While the logic behind mobile proximity payments is generally accepted, precisely when they will become widely available and how the industry will get there are still being debated. The convergence of mobile and payment is extremely complex, requiring the cooperation of many players and stakeholders.

The report concludes 86% of the industry stakeholders interviewed predict proximity mobile payments will be adopted, and that the business model will require collaboration among banks, mobile operators, merchants, handset manufacturers and other service providers.

This is an excellent report and I highly recommend reading it.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/The-Smart-Card-Alliance-900869
.html

TowerGroup, an industry research firm reported recently that 3 million people used mobile banking in the past 90 days as of June 2008. That number almost tripled the number of people who used it six months earlier.

Bank of America alone has 1.2 million bank users. In Australia, the number of mobile phones subscribers now outnumbers the population of the entire country.

The opportunities for mobile financial services are truly endless.

Interesting article was posted today about a company, A Little World (ALW) out of India who provides financial services in remote areas through the use of mobile phones and biometrics. ALW recently announced they have surpassed the one million customer threshold.

The company also currently has affiliations with 15 banks in India. Their main product, ZERO, allows customers to complete a wide range of financial services over the phone while using biometrics to ensure authenticity of the user.

ALW hosts 20,000 customers per day and the company hopes to grow the total customer base to 5 million by the end of the fiscal year.