By Howard Moodycliffe, Commercial and Marketing Head at wiGroup
Turning our mobile phones into wallets has been a dream for a long time. The phone in your pocket is already an address book, camera, diary, music player, GPS system, notebook, dictaphone, photo album and general factotum – why shouldn’t it also replace your wallet, with all its clunky coins, notes, credit cards and vouchers you keep forgetting about?
The biggest obstacle to making this dream a reality has always been the sheer complexity of electronic transactions: Every time you present your credit card at a till you initiate an intricate dance between the retailer, your bank, the retailer’s bank, and a financial switch. It only takes milliseconds, but the system behind that deceptively simply action is the carefully tended product of decades of development. Introducing new actors into the dance is hard.
Hard, but not impossible: Much of the behind-the-scenes infrastructure needed to make mobile transactions a reality is already in place. The final, hardest hurdle is the point of sale itself. Any retailer who wants to accept mobile payments, including mobile vouchers and coupons, has to physically enable those transactions on every single one of the tens or hundreds or thousands of till points across the country – and then train the operators in how to use.
It doesn’t take much imagination to realise what an expensive exercise this is. It’s an expense retailers are willing to undertake – if they can be assured that it will pay off. But if the return on their investment depends on the success of any one application or mobile payment system, it’s dead in the water. No matter how brilliant that one app or system might be, it will never capture 100% of the market; and there will always be another one along next week that could suddenly overtake all the others in popularity. Customers who get told “Sorry, we only accept mobile payments from X wallet or Y bank” will complain loudly or take their money elsewhere – not the outcome any retailer wants.
This helps to explain why the takeoff of mobile transacting has been delayed for so long – and also why it’s now finally gaining traction.
The key has been to reduce the risk to retailers by removing the need for them to make an exclusive, all-or-nothing commitment. By installing a platform layer that any app, system or mobile payment services provider can plug into, retailers like Shoprite Checkers and Pick n Pay are, for the first time ever, making in-store mobile transacting a success.
How an open platform like this works is easiest to understand by analogy with mobile phone app stores. It’s hard to remember now, but Apple completely changed the world of mobile phones with its first App Store in 2008. For the first time, phone owners had access to a wide variety of apps that could make their phone do just about anything – and were easy to install. On the other side of the equation, it was the first time app developers – whether established companies or 15-year-olds coding in their bedrooms — were easily able to reach millions of potential customers. The result was an explosion of creative innovation that is showing no signs of stopping. Since the first day the App Store opened with few hundred apps, it’s grown to more than 900,000 apps have been downloaded a collective 50 billion times. Apple has paid out $10bn to developers.
The mobile transaction platform currently being pioneered by South African retailers works on the same basis. For banks, mobile app developers and payment service providers it provides a single interface through which they can reach any retailer and its customers. For the retailers, it means they can enable any mobile transaction method at the till quickly and easily through a single integration, helping them to respond flexibly to new opportunities and changing customer demand.
The results are impressive. At Shoprite’s Hungry Lion fast food franchise, for example, customers have already redeemed well over a million mobile coupons for discounts, free extras or purchase upsizes; at Pick n Pay, MTN Mobile Money transactions are growing phenomenally by the day. To date, the platform has processed transactions worth over one and a half billion rand.
What happens next? That’s limited only by our imaginations.
About wiGroup
wiGroup is a pioneering software business, with a focus on the development of mobile transaction and application technology, while specializing on the integration into a retailer’s point of sale software. The company was founded in 2007, has accumulated over 45 000 hours of development IP, provides mobile payment technology to over 40 000 retail lanes in South Africa, and has processed over R1 billion in transaction value during 2013. wiGroup’s clients include two of the largest mobile network providers in Africa (MTN and Vodacom), some of the largest media companies, agencies, brands and consumer applications, as well as enabling the two largest social network apps in South Africa (MXit and Facebook).
wiGroup
Howard Moodycliffe
Email: howard@wigroup.co.za
