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Innovativo Director to Speak at Informa Mobile Event

I'm pleased to say that I've been asked to present at the upcoming Informa Conference on Mobile Financial Services to be held at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London on March 9th.

My presentation will focus on the market opportunity for Mobile Payments identifying why some countries offer better opportunities than others and what the major geographic trends are.

For registration details, please see and I hope to see you there for a chat over coffee.

I plan to first of all identify the different opportunities for different mobile payment propositions. For example, the market value of a particular region or country varies greatly depending on whether you're thinking of launching micro-payment solutions versus mobile remittances. The mobile phone is pretty much ubiquitous everywhere, including the developing world (where the number of phones outstrips even the number of televisions), but its only in the West and tiger economies where you're going to see any great number of sophisticated phones such as the iPhone or other smartphone. As such, the technologies that are fuelling the great opportunities in the developing world such as Africa will exploit SMS and will need to work on older, less functionally rich devices.

This is the conundrum for the global players in this space. Should they focus on the high ARPU pickings in the rich West, where implementation costs are higher and technical innovation is more of a gamble (who would have forecast the demise of HD-DVD so quickly and the emergence of a single standard in Blu-Ray) or should they go for the mass-market approach in Africa, Asia or South America? The latter brings its own problems from local nuances and laws that need to be negotiated. Local partnerships will be crucial in this space and a feeding frenzy of M&As and joint ventures are likely to dominate the headlines over the next months and years...

I'm looking forward to making this presentation. We all know there are opportunities out there and it will be good for me to do the research and drill down into the ones that make most sense... Of course, I'll share my findings on here, so watch this space.

See you on the 9th March?
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