DM: So John, give us the low-down on the Mobile Money Network please.
JM: It’s a joint venture between Best Buy (including The Carphone Warehouse), mobile money specialist Monitise, and Carphone Warehouse founder, Charles Dunstone. We have some good people on board, including our chairman Stuart Rose, ex-M&S chairman. We also have Johnny Hornby, co-founder and partner at advertising agency CHI, who is a non-executive director. And from the banking world, we have Lord (Mervyn) Davies of Abersoch, former Minister of State for Trade Promotion and Investment, and former chairman of Standard Chartered plc, who is also a non-executive director at Mobile Money Network.
DM: OK, so there are a lot of mobile payments schemes coming to market, what’s your USP?
JM: It’s all around convenience. Our aim is to provide a simple mobile payments service to retailers, enabling consumers to pay for goods via their mobile phone - any mobile phone, not just smartphones - and enabling retailers to capture sales they might otherwise have lost.
DM: So how does it work?
JM: Retailers can’t keep large stocks of every item; they have to concentrate on the high volume items. But at the moment, if you go into a store and look for something and it’s out of stock, there’s a good chance the retailer will lose the sale.
Our idea is to get retailers and consumers to sign up to our scheme, which is called ‘Simply Tap’. We have an app for iOS, RIM and Android that consumers can download. Then when the consumer is in the store, they can order an item simply by entering an alphanumeric code for the item in question. After that, the payment for the item is taken from the card the consumer has registered with us, and the item is delivered to the address that the customer has registered with us.
It means the retailer could have an area of the store dedicated to selling items for home delivery using Simply Tap. They would not need any stock, just a display model for each item. This could apply to lower-volume items, or just big items that the customer doesn’t want to carry home.
We also think that consumers will use Simply Tap to buy products from any print, broadcast, outdoor and online advertising, and from eCommerce sites. The current drop-out rate from someone arriving on the homepage of a website to someone making a purchase is 97 per cent, and even from someone having items in their basket to purchase, it’s 50 per cent. We think Simply Tap has great potential to improve this by eliminating the need to enter your details every time you want to buy something online because your details will already be in our system.
DM: And if the customer doesn’t have an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android phone?
JM: Then they can order the item via SMS by texting the alphanumeric code to a shortcode. Using alphanumeric codes for product identification initially is important to us because it means the system works with any phone, using SMS as the default channel. But we will implement barcode, QR code and other scanning technologies soon after launch for those customers on smartphones.
DM: And you make your money by taking a commission on each purchase made through the system presumably?
JM: Yes, we take a single-digit commission.
DM: So where are you at currently?
JM: We are talking to 17 of the top 20 High St. brands, and we are in the process of doing a technical integration with five retailers. We will be going live with The Carphone Warehouse late summer, initially in catalogues but then it will be extended to in-store and online. Best Buy will be next, with a similar roll out pattern to Carphone Warehouse. Then we’ll announce other retailers in due course.
John Milliken is managing director of the Mobile Money Network
