Austrian Telco Finds You Can't "Go it Alone" in Mobile Payments

It is extremely difficult for any single brand, especially a telecom service provider brand, to launch its own branded mobile payments system, competing, in other words, with MasterCard and Visa.

Isis, the venture owned by At&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, considered that approach but fairly quickly turned to a business model based on marketing, advertising and other e-commerce services other than processing transactions. 

But Austria mobile service provider A1 gave it a try. It launched a "paybox NFC" payment system focused on mobile parking fare-collection service, as well as retail point of sale. 

The telco, which is one of the few operators worldwide to operate its own bank, still found the task too daunting. A1, which is part of the Telekom Austria Group, had tried to get other Austrian telcos to take part in the paybox NFC payment scheme, but was apparently unsuccessful. 

Nor was A1 able to entice a wide range of retailer to embrace the system, either.  The closed-loop system also meant consumers would not be able to use the payment service outside of Austria.

The industry is in the early days of the shift to mobile commerce, including mobile payments and mobile wallets, so lots of trials will be held, and lots of approaches will fail. Some competitors still are going to try to take on the likes of Visa and MasterCard. You might say PayPal is among them. 

Some will try and take on card issuers. Count Square and others among this group. 

But many will simply look elsewhere for opportunities within the mobile commerce business.