After participants register their credit card details, they can purchase goods in participating merchants using their mobile phone. During the pilot phase, merchants include the Interflora florist chain and the Allocine cinema group.
Once the pilot has been completed, SFR says it intends to sign up more merchants for the service and will allow people to use their phones to pay for premium content as well. According to a spokesperson for Baltimore, SFR is billing all goods and services to credit cards, rather than adding them to users' phone bills.
"The French are prolific users of credit cards in comparison to the Irish," the spokesperson told ElectricNews.Net. "But Vodafone Ireland get 17 percent of their revenues from data services, so other mobile companies may choose to charge goods and services to people's phone bills."
If the phone is stolen, there are two levels of security to prevent any fraudulent use of the handset; the PIN number of the phone itself plus a six-digit PIN required to confirm each transaction.
SFR has not made the program available to pre-paid customers during the pilot, according to Thomas Hutin, a technical consultant at Baltimore Technologies, while speaking to ElectricNews.Net. Hutin said the programme is more suited to customers who have accounts. "You need a significant amount of information about the customer for this process to work, which means you'll need to have a relatively close relationship with the customer," he said.
However, a report in early July by Analysys warned mobile providers that pre-paid mobile phone users will be critical to the success of the emerging m-commerce mobile data market. The report said that despite the dominance of pre-paid users in terms of customer numbers, most operators have only made advanced services available to their contract customers.
Pre-paid customers are thought to account for 63 percent of active mobile users in Western Europe, and despite operator efforts to convert them to contract subscriptions, they will remain a substantial segment of the mobile market for at least the next five years. Many operators have attempted to nudge pre-paid users into contracts, hoping to increase the average revenue per user, which is much lower for pre-paid that for billed customers.
The announcement is the second item of good news to be announced by Baltimore this week, as it announced on Wednesday that it was working with Dutch group DigiNotar, to introduce public key-based service to aid the development of e-government in the Netherlands
Quelle: Electric News
