The continent has, at a pace far outstripping the west, adopted mobile payment systems in huge numbers - more than 15 million in Kenya alone.
Better Than Cash (formerly the 20% Initiative), a program to introduce electronic and mobile payment systems to developing countries to facilitate the distribution of aid resources.
The impetus is likely to come from operators, such as Turkey's Turkcell, which see it, along with other mobile payment systems, as an additional revenue stream.
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This has been a source of pain for credit card payment companies as well as banks as the credit card business represents a sizable part of their business models and the mobile payment systems were often advertised as significantly cheaper alternatives to the card payment systems.
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Rather than waiting for the numerous mobile payment systems from Google, Isis, the Merchant Exchange, Square, and others to get traction and see which thrives or is dies on the vine, launching such a mobile payment solution would enable Apple to bring mobile payments to the market today.
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This, inevitably, would work with (or potentially get in the way of, depending how you look at it) the onset of mobile payment systems using NFC (Near Field Communications) technology, essentially the fabled notion of waving your mobile phone in front of a checkout to pay for a cup of coffee.
It's a potentially strong start to one of the few truly cross-network mobile payment systems in the US, but we see a long road ahead before Isis gives Google Wallet some jitters -- there's legions of banks, cities and stores needed before Isis is widespread, and we're not counting on that ever-elusive universal hardware support.
The result in turn is a range of mobile wallet payment systems in Austria, France, Turkey and elsewhere.
Led by Jack Dorsey, who helped set up Twitter, Square has pioneered mobile-payment systems for smartphones, but it has rivals in this fast-developing market, including Google and PayPal.
It seems as if it's about ready to take off, and Apple has been notoriously late to the party on many other standards (see LTE, above), but with so many iPhones in circulation this could hurt the adoption rate, just as mobile phone payment systems are getting ready for prime time.
At the event, Google, Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint introduced Google Wallet and invited additional issuing banks, payment networks, mobile carriers, handset manufacturers, point of sale systems companies and merchants to join the initiative.
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Some new cloud-based solutions act as payment processors, as well as offering back-end customer relations management systems and the ability to accept mobile payments in the growing Internet economy.
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