Starbucks has launched a nationwide mobile payments capability integrated with its existing Starbucks Card program. One can argue the merits of introducing a "single retailer" mobile payment capability compared to a more-universal approach, but Starbucks clearly wants to move now, and not have to wait for more-universal mechanisms to develop. Also, Starbucks has chosen a cheaper-to-deploy, less complicated approach as well.
The other angle is that Starbucks likely is less interested in mobile payments, and more interested in customer loyalty. If that is the case, then a universal mobile payments solution is not the point. Mobile payment using iPhones and BlackBerries, and soon Android devices, is more about loyalty than ease of payment.
As for why the United States lags nations such as Japan, there are lots of reasons generally offered. But it probably is noteworthy that "NTT DoCoMo owns more than 80 percent of the Japanese market, so they can dictate requirements to phone manufacturers and dictate a single standard," says Conrad Sheehan, CEO and founder of mPayy. In South Korea, which has three carriers, SK Telecom owns 50.5 percent of the market.
Further, NTT DoCoMo issues its own "DCMX" Premium and Gold cards to provide its customers credit lines, while SK Telecom has the "Moneta" service, Sheehan said. In essence, the leading South Korean and Japanese mobile operators already are in the banking business. That isn't true in the U.S. market.
But there are other reasons why mobile applications are more advanced in those countries. Landline access to the Web is much more expensive in those countries than it is in the United States. Ironically, one of the frequent complaints about U.S. fixed-line broadband is that it is "too costly." That might not be the case, but the perception exists.
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