Opportunities and challenges of mobile payment services : The perspective of service providers

Abstract:  Mobile payments are transforming the payments industry. These services open up the opportunity for non-banking actors to enter the market. In order to embrace this challenge, banks, traditional payments market players, are forced to launch mobile payments. However, in Europe and most developed economies, a big number of launched services get terminated soon after their introduction in the market. Hence, the ability of different actors to act locally calls for additional research.The main objective of this thesis is to broaden knowledge and understanding about the ways mobile payment service providers address the opportunities and challenges of mobile payment services. In order to investigate this problem, this research (i) explores factors stimulating and hindering the introduction of mobile payments using perspectives of different types of service providers (i.e., banks, independent providers, direct operator billing providers, retailers, and public transport companies) and (ii) seeks to explain the importance of these factors for each type of provider.The primary data collected using interview method. More than 40 industry representatives in six countries were contacted. The Service, Technology, Organisation, and Finance (STOF) model was used as a theoretical research framework. This is a business modelling framework that specifies a set of critical design issues that have to  be considered within each model’s domain.Research findings highlight that the organisation domain is the key domain, which  affects all other domains and has an impact on the general viability of the business model. A comparison of the approaches used by different service providers to address each of the critical design issues helped to identify the factors that are most important within each domain. These factors stimulate or hinder development of a viable business model within each category of service providers.This research contributes to a better understanding of challenges and success factors associated with the design of business models for new mobile services and uses the lens of the STOF model. The contributions to the academic research on mobile payments are: (i) collection and analysis of a rich empirical data set on mobile payment services implemented in six Northern European countries, (ii) discussion of a bigger picture by connecting research findings to the context of the existing payment system, (iii) extension  of knowledge on business models for mobile ticketing, and (iv) extension of knowledge on the value of mobile ticketing services in the business-to-business (B2B) context.