On 27-28 of June, I attended the 7th PhD Seminar organized by the International Telecommunications Society (ITS) Europe in San Lorenzo del Escorial, Spain. PhD Seminar’s participants also had the opportunity to attend the 26th European Regional Conference of the ITS. Using this opportunity I have attended a number of presentations.
One of the presentation was the most related to the area of my research (e.i. mobile payments). This was Harry Bouwman who presented a paper titled “Mobile payments: a multi-perspective, multi-method research project” written in cooperation with six co-authors. The researches have looked into different aspects of mobile payment adoption issues that face different stakeholders (consumers, merchants, MNOs, banks, and service providers). The major conclusions are:
- There is a limited usage of mobile payments by consumers (only 1% of Dutch consumers use the service on regular basis);
- Development of common mobile payment platforms by banks and MNOs fails;
- Mobile payments are rarely seen as an alternative to existing payment systems;
- Safety and critical mass of consumers is an important factor for merchant adoption.
In terms of a service development:
- User experience and security are important for customers;
- Business case and viability of the mobile payment solution are important for a service provider.
These results are similar to the results we get in our research of mobile payments in Sweden. The authors see the future of mobile payments as multisided platforms uniting all involved stakeholders. This would allow reaching a critical mass of users and making the service attractive for merchants and other parties.
During the PhD seminar I presented a paper “The effect of innovative service introduction on existing business networks”. It provides the analysis of a change that the introduction of mobile payments made to the existing business network in retail industry in Sweden. The major contribution of the seminar is in the provided comments and feedback from the assigned discussant and following discussion of the paper by all participants of the seminar.
