As I realize that I have been going a little off schedule for posting on Finix Post, I am also realizing that it has been quite a long time since I have talked about the Hottest Technology Trends 2014.
After talking about the two most popular concepts that are expected to rock the technology market – Smart Cities & Wearable Devices, I thought of doing some good research and find out which another technology is expected to rise. While all my research kept on making me realize how smart phones and related technologies have been dominating the technology market, I definitely found the third one for the list – Mobile Money.
Till a few days before, there was possibly just one thing that I knew about ‘Mobile Money’. I could transfer the balance from my friend’s phone to my own phone, if we use the same service provider.
Before you waste your useful time thinking about the kind of comment I made about Mobile Money in the last paragraph, I would like to divert your attention to what Mobile Money actually is. The Mobile Money or Mobile payment refers to the payments that are performed on or via a mobile phone.
According to Wikipedia, a concept like this has a very long history but still, Mobile Money isn’t that popular and common amongst the people. There hasn’t been much technology and support for the Mobile Money. But technology fortune-tellers are placing good bets on this concept now.
Currently, there are a few models that are being worked upon to develop the concept of Mobile Money properly. These are – SMS based payments, Direct Mobile Billing, WAP and Contactless NFC.
The SMS based payments would work just by sending an SMS. This SMS would inform the merchant about the payment and the merchant can deliver the product. Just by sending an SMS, your payment would be done. But isn’t this a little risky task? What if the SMS gets lost? Moreover, the process is too slow and the merchants would probably lose their customers during the process. Won’t they?
If you are visiting an e-commerce store and want to buy a product, you can easily use Direct Mobile Billing method. This method gives your transactions quite a lot of security by employing two-step authentication technique. This method is certainly better than the SMS based payment method due to security reasons and is considered to be fast and easy.
Apart from this method, which seems a good one to me, there are more methods like WAP(Mobile Web Payments) which allows a person to make payments by using an application installed in his mobile device and possesses all the benefits (drawbacks too) of wireless application protocol, NFC which would be helpful in making purchases through physical stores (a special device is required for this), Cloud based mobile payments just like PayPal, Google, GlobalPay etc, audio based signal payments which use the acoustics features of cell phones to support the concept of Mobile Money and direct bank co-operation method.
Well, the options available for Mobile Money are quite a lot but still, the concept has not been widely accepted in the global market. What reasons could be behind this? Why isn’t this so popular till now? And which option would suit the best for Mobile Money to become popular worldwide?
Also, do you think I made a right choice by enlisting this as the 3rd one in the Hottest Technology Trends 2014 series? Do share with me.
This is really knowledgeable article!!!!
Thank you Nitin. Did you read the last two posts in the series? Tell me what do you feel about them. 🙂
its such a amazing article.the tecnology of mobile phones are awesone importantable and helpfull for our modern life .your article about make money by phone is also a oriented toppic…thanx…