having to fill out a form and type in a credit card number to buy something is only mildly annoying. On a cellphone, it could make you
wholesale phone want to skip the purchase entirely.This is why investors, start-ups and major corporations are pouring money into services that make it easier to use cellphones to buy goods and transfer money. The aim is to turn phones into virtual credit cards or checkbooks, enabling the kind of click-and-buy commerce and online banking that people have come to expect on their PCs. But shrinking down those services to fit onto cellphones presents serious challenges.The services must work on many different phones and through many cellphone service providers, which usually control the billing relationships
wholesale china phone with customers. That adds complexity to the already tricky business of safely and securely transferring funds among financial institutions and merchants. Mobile payment systems have been tried before, with only
wholesale mobile phone modest success. Driving a new flurry of deal making, industry analysts and executives say, is the success of the iPhone, BlackBerry and other sophisticated devices. These phones make complex interactions easier, and they have shown that people on the go are willing to spend on music, games and virtual goods, like a $2 costume for a character in a video game.Now the race is on to develop new payment systems — and to get several percentage points in fees from each transaction. “A lot of big players with big bucks are investing a lot of money in this,” said J. Gerry Purdy, an industry analyst for Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm. “They’re seeing that returns could be so huge.” “We know it’s going to be there,” he said of the technology. “The question is how to make it easy for people.” Obopay, a start-up that lets people transmit money to one another via **** message, raised $35 million from Nokia’s investment arm in March. That was the single largest investment in a financial services start-up this year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Last week, MasterCard introduced a service called MoneySend that uses some of Obopay’s technology. Also last week, a mobile payments start-up called Boku announced that it had received $13 million in venture capital financing. Boku, which is the product of a merger of the start-ups Paymo and Mobillcash, says it views itself as the mobile phone’s answer to MasterCard or Visa. But instead of relying on credit card numbers, Boku asks users to type in their phone numbers.