The announcement last week by several telecommunication companies of plans to create a joint venture to fast-track mobile-payments processing potentially has broad implications for the mobile-payments market in Europe. But the companies have worked together before with little resulting success.
Telefónica UK, Vodafone UK, and T-Mobile and Orange parent Everything Everywhere’s announced the joint venture (
But the venture failed to get off the ground, and this latest venture could share the same fate if the companies cannot agree on the details, Nitesh Patel, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, a multinational consulting firm, said in a phone interview last week.
“Historically, mobile operators have their own agendas and strategies, and they’ll have to have consensus,” Patel said. “Sometimes, or oftentimes, it doesn’t actually play out.”
The companies hope to roll out the joint venture by the end of the year, assuming they get antitrust clearance, which Patel doubts will be a problem.
“They will almost certainly have some provision in there to be able to differentiate from each other,” he said.
There is not enough information to know what will happen, but the joint venture could become the most comprehensive European mobile initiative by going beyond payments and into marketing and coupons, Patel said. This potentially would enable customers to use discount offers at the point of purchase.
“There’s a long way to go for that kind of thing to be a wide-scale reality, but they’re making more steps,” he said.
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