Some highlights of an interesting conference in Amsterdam:
1. Consumers are willing to pay for mobile payments, especially for parking, public transport and road pricing.
2. RTL Netherlands receives about 60 million premium sms-es per year; their demand to better payment mechanisms focuses mainly on squeezing the current operator marging of 20-40%.
3. Netsize estimates the EU market for mobile services at 23 billion euro and the Dutch market at 1 billion euro.
4. Mobile operators still are the opinion that pre-paid purses with eurovalue in them, from which third parties are being paid, have nothing to do with e-money, money and need not be regulated. The representatives of those operators that effectively operate the most use mobile payment channel, downplay the importance of their payment channels, while not disclosing any data to back this up.
5. Banks intend to expand the internet payment mechanism Ideal for use on mobile channels as well. But first concentrate on the Internet part
6. Simpay will go live in second quarter of 2005; merchants accepting simpay will be faced with 30% fee to be paid as a merchant service charge.
