SAP AG (www.sap.com) has announced the findings of its third consecutive GSMA Mobile World Congress survey, which found that 53% of industry leaders believed that improving customers' retail experience would be essential to creating a successful mobile payments scheme.
The survey is aimed at addressing top issues facing mobile commerce service providers and reflects the sentiments of mobile operators, fixed telecommunication providers, over-the-top (OTT) players and other global mobile industry executives.
Survey results revealed that the "secret sauce" for creating a better retail experience includes location-based point-of-sale offerings (24%), point-of-sale services such as near field communication (NFC) (28%) and facilitating universal acceptance of mobile payments (25%). Less popular services included targeted offers based on consumer preferences and shopping history (12%) and integration with mass transit (95).
"We are seeing a maturing of the mobile payments market, as we move from a service that is driven by person-to-person payments to one that must tackle the challenges of the retail environment," says Diarmuid Mallon , lead, Global Mobile Marketing Programs, SAP. "It is clear from our survey that in addition to improving the payment experience, mobile wallet apps need to support a multitude of services such as loyalty and couponing."
The anticipated leaders of future successful mobile payments offerings included banks (29%); online payment schemes, such as PayPal, Apple iTunes or Amazon Payments (28%); credit cards (26%) or a consortium of operators (26%). This statistic diverged slightly from the 2012 SAP Mobile World Congress Survey, which anticipated banks (24%) and mobile operators (26%) would be important catalysts, but placed lower expectations on credit cards (10%) and online payment networks (19%).
The survey found that 34% of the respondents felt that applications like Apple Passbook will speed up brands offering wallet services. In regard to changes in the mobile wallet, only 28% of mobile insiders expected new ticketing and coupon services, such as Apple Passbook, Google Now and the Samsung wallet app, could become an alternative to true mobile wallets; and still, 38% believed that the lack of consumer awareness and too much confusion around the offerings were holding back mobile wallet services.
The survey was conducted on-site at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Spain, with responses collected from Feb. 25-26. The survey included 300 respondents, representing a cross-section of attendees, including mobile operators (14%), fixed telecommunication operators (12%), OTT players (9%), vendors (22%) and other mobile industry leaders (43%). Respondents represented a wide swath of geographies including Europe, the Middle East, Africa (60%), the Americas (25%) and Asia (15%).
