US mobile payment venture Isis (which you might recall has the backing of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile) has announced three new financial institutions on board with the service - Capital One, Chase, and Barclaycard.

Add that to support from the main merchants (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discovery) and a number of the top tier handset manufacturers, and you can see that this NFC based solution has some big building blocks it can use in the upcoming trials in America.

Isis shares many features with Google Wallet, which is going to be useful as consumers familiar with one system will find that the other works in pretty much the same way. That's important for confidence, but with all those names behind Isis, there's even more to deliver. Essentially, if the man or woman on the street had to choose a platform, they'd probably go with the one that had lots of big names they recognise, including the bank that they use.

With this announcement, Isis is standing up as if to say "people will choose me."

The Isis trials commence this summer in Austin and Salt Lake City, and while that gives Google Wallet a good head start, with a year of field trials on ...

So, did you see what wasn't announced by Apple? That's right, while the new iPhone (the 4S) comes with a new faster processor, likely more memory, and a rather nifty voice recognition system that leverages the cloud for processing and parsing your questions, it is missing something that many of us were expecting.

NFC.

The lack of near field communications could be down to practical hardware reasons (the late inclusion of a micro-SIM card might have used the physical space and power that NFC would have needed), or that Apple haven't managed to crack a mobile money system that has a beautiful simplicity so it continues to be iterated in private till it "just works".

No matter the reason, everyone in the space has another six months to a year to work on mobile money projects before the iGorilla enters the room. That means Google and the Android handset manufactures can work away with their NFC solution using Google Wallet. Paypal can continue to push their non-hardware specific alternative. That means there's little chance of an alternative technology taking the PR inches out of the London Olympics and the contactless payment trials going ahead.

It doesn't mean that Apple are not going to come ...

As a provider of mobile money transaction platforms, we get to work in some of the most interesting and remote parts of the world.  One such place is Papua New Guinea (PNG) where we were recently selected to power Digicel Group’s cellmoni mobile money service.  This service includes all the normal things you’d expect, as well as the ability to transfer money to friends and family anywhere in the country.  Also powered by Telepin and hosted on the Digicel network are Post PNG’s MobileSMK and MiCash from Nationwide Microbank.
 
There appears to be great demand by residents of PNG for a system that enhances cash safety, which includes phone transfers and a means to transact, store and accumulate value for later use.    The solutions from Digicel, Post PNG and Nationwide Microbank are delivering a best-in-class solution that extends value to PNG mobile subscribers, merchant networks and ecosystem partners.
 
Telepin’s Cayman Transaction platform is used by all three providers for mobile financial services (MFS) offerings.  The service is regulated by the Central Bank of PNG and has been developed in partnership with Pacific Financial Inclusion Programme (PFIP) with a view to promoting financial inclusion within ...

A little experiment in social giving and taking held this past August might provide some clues to the promotion and uptake of mobile money, and is well worth studying.

Jonathan Stark had a Starbucks card, and it's replicated on his iPhone. But he wanted to carry it on another phone. Which didn't have a Starbucks card So he took a screenshot of the app, and displayed that picture at the counter. The barcode still scanned, and he could get coffee from his card no matter what phone he was using.

But would it work if someone else had the picture?

So the picture was posted online, tens of thousands of people around the world not only paid for coffee, but reloaded the card and passed on the value to others - it only stopped when someone publicly declared they were skimming value off the card's account and putting over $600 on their own Starbucks card - at which point the Seattle based company decided to void the account (but not before publicly supporting it and getting a shed load of goodwill and PR).

So what lesions can be learned from this virtually enhanced store card?

I can spot a few clear takeaways. The first is ...

And then, all of a sudden, Nokia potentially switch on a few million NFC smartphones.

Last week, Nokia released a major software update to their latest smartphones, running the Symbian ^3 operating system. One of those handsets, the Nokia C7 has long been known to have NFC hardware inside the chassis, although it was unreachable from software.

That's all changed now, as the NFC chip is now ready for use in the wild. While it might not have the name recognition on the street as Google's Nexus/Android combination, it's already being used by developers in a number of applications, from unlocking levels in Angry Birds Magic and setting up bluetooth connections on stereo speakers, to advertising and file transfers.

The real value is going to be in having a mass market handset that networks can use to trial NFC mobile payments. Orange in the UK are running their trial with the Samsung Tocco, a feature phone with Java support, but far from what many people would consider a  smartphone. The Nokia C7 changes that. While the choice of Symbian OS might raise the eyebrows of the American market, it's the same system that runs on the best selling Nokia N8, so is familiar ...

Now it's the turn of T-Mobile USA's to step up to homeplate as they announce that subscribers will be able to purchase services and goods through their mobile phone account.

Similar to the recent announcement with Verizon and Amex, T-Mobile are offering carrier billing for a number of stores and items to their customers. Much like a credit card bill, items purchased through carrier billing on your phone will appear on a monthly bill, alongside call charges, data bandwidth, and the rest of the fun of the mobile monthly account.

It also means that transactions are going to be a lot easier to push through as credit card details will not need to be entered on the mobile screen, but simply applied to the next phone bill.

It's good to see that T-Mobile are using the ISIS system, just as Verizon are using. A common system, much like email, will help adoption of a standard, and then the mobile networks can duke it out just as Visa, Mastercard and Amex do in the bespoke credit card marketplace.

Given that everyone pretty much grabs their phone before leaving the house, enabling it as a psuedo-credit card makes practical sense, but making sure that this ability ...

American Express have followed up their announcement of Serve in Q1 with details of a US mobile network tie-in. Sprint will carry the application in their Mobile App Store for a number of smartphone devices (including iOS, Android and Windows Phone) to give subscribers to the Serve system.

Serve is a digital payment service that's more than an Amex credit card, and should allow our flexible friend to deal with Web 2.0 companies such as Paypal and Square. With all the start-ups coming out of the Valley, it's important for the old faithfuls of Visa, Mastercard and Amex to have "skin in the game" not just to gain market knowledge, but also to be seen to be doing something. It's far easier to change the course of projects like Serve than it would be to start from scratch in three years time when everyone else has influenced the market and how it will all work for the consumer.

And there's the volume of transactions in Africa and Asia that stay strictly on mobile phones, and never go near a traditional credit card. As an incumbent, you must make a play for those transactions.

So it's great to see Amex put everything in practice. ...

Congratulations to Digicel for being named PNG's most Innovative Company of the Year 2011 at the prestigious PNG Institute of Directors Awards held earlier this summer.
 
At PNGID’s Award Ceremony, the Institute’s Director Wayne Dorgan highlighted some of the most recent innovations introduced by PNG’s leading telecommunications company, including:  the launch of Digicel’s high speed broadband in May;  Digicel’s pioneering commitment to offering high quality Customer Care services which now sees it provide “outsourced” Call Centre solutions to other companies; the rollout in March of a new faster electronic top-up option with Post PNG and the development of the groundbreaking “cellmoni” mobile banking service, which looks set to transform the way Papua New Guineans handle and transfer money.

When receiving the award Digicel’s Operations Director, Lorna McPherson welcomed the recognition on behalf of all of Digicel PNG’s 600 strong Team saying; “Innovation comes from within and the success of Digicel is driven by our local team and their commitment to serving PNG.  Digicel has set the standards for telecommunications in PNG since our launch and we are determined to continue to offer the best value, superior customer care and most innovative and customer focused services.”

You can check out more on Digicel's ...

Visa has purchased South African based Fundamo for $110 million. Out of Cape Town, Fundamo is a "building block" company that helps other companies (especially mobile networks) deliver financial solutions, including a full Enterprise edition service, alongside a Mobile Wallet and Mobile Banking product that can be white labelled and a number of other services.

Partnered with the GSM Association, mobile service provider Gemalto, and Sun Computing (to name three), Fundamo is one of those quiet companies that has quietly got on with the job since they were founded in 2000. The purchase by Visa gives a good return to the investors, and bolsters the Visa portfolio in the mobile banking space.

Readers will recall that Visa have invested in Square for an undisclosed amount, but did receive a seat on iPhone payment system's corporate board; and in February acquired PlaySpan, an in-application payment system that's used by over 1000 online games and virtual worlds for the purchase of goods and services, including their real-world git card system that allows people to charge up their virtual accounts.

For all the disruptive tendencies these starts-up promise, once they get established the big boys are going to wonder if it's better to have a foot ...

There's a lot of testing, piloting and trialling going on with smartphones and contactless payment as a way of creating a mobile money system. The recent news has been from the mobile phone networks, with their own systems and specialist phones, but now Visa have promoted a piece of technology from "proof of concept" to "field trial".

DeviceFidelity's microSD card can be added to any smartphone, and as well as the extra memory storage, it also has NFC technology so any phone can become a contactless payment handset. We can only assume the internal tests started in May last year have proven successful, as Visa takes the iPhone enabling solution to the streets of France (along with the Android powered Samsung Galaxy S and the Blackberry Bold).

Nice and Strasbourg will take part in the trial, with the established Visa payWave system creating the technology backbone.

Here's the interesting bit. The trial is not being run by the mobile phone networks - it's purely a play from Visa and the BPCE banking group. While the hardware is still in early iterations (secondary NFC antennas are needed on the handset). The suspicion is that this is more a publicity move from Visa to keep ...