China Mobile invests in Africa
China Mobile has expressed interest in investing in Africa, where it plans to boost services in rural areas, reports Business Week.
The company doesn't have any acquisition targets in Africa yet and hasn't identified a specific region on the continent where it would like to invest. “The purpose is to push business for mobile payments,” according to China Mobile chairman, Jianzhou Wang.
The Beijing-based company this year agreed to buy a 20% stake in Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, a move that Wang says will help boost its wireless payment and finance operations.
Outsourced payment services to grow
According to the Verizon 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report, which was cited in the RSA report, 285 million payment card records were breached in 2008, states ZDNet Asia.
To combat online fraud and still be able to manage spiralling maintenance costs, the RSA study suggested retailers look at a form of outsourced service arrangement, which it called the 'secure payment services' model.
Craig Tieken, vice-president of merchant product management at merchant processing services company First Data, predicts many merchants will move to an outsourced services model by 2015, and that this shift will create a new industry standard for securely processing credit, debt and other payment card transactions.
Mobile payment booms in Asia-Pacific
The worldwide user base for mobile payments may reach the mark of 108.6 million in this fiscal year, says Top News.
The mobile payment user base was 70.2 million worldwide in the year 2009. According to global research firm Gartner, the total mobile payment users are going to comprise 2.1% of all mobile users in the year 2010.
The firm has also predicted that Asia-Pacific region will be the largest market for mobile payment in terms of user base. It is expecting that there will be 62.8 million users by the end of 2010 from this region itself.
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