Agile Development - A Product Owner's Story

I recently conducted a poll of managers and senior managers across a range of industries to find out which mobile-based method of loyalty reward appeals the most to consumers. My objective was to find out whether there was real scope for free mobile top-up (free call minutes, free texts or free downloads) to be offered to consumers for each purchase they made in retail (or online) stores. The benefit of this approach for the retailer (the encouraging of loyalty apart) is that it's a scheme that easy and cost efficient to operate. The findings from the survey were interesting. The base was 57 managers and senior managers. 57 said they would prefer free mobile top-up in the form of call minutes as a reward for brand or store loyalty above all other rewards proposed. Less than 1% said they'd prefer free text top ups (possibly because the value of a text is deemed quite low and most phone packages provide more than enough free texts anyway - maybe a question for the next surve...

I have just published a free to download White Paper that addresses the global market opportunity for Mobile Financial Services and presents a view on which regions represent the best opportunity for growth in both revenue and profitability. It also identifies some of the challenges and other factors that could affect regional growth for Mobile Financial Services. The potential revenue and profitability from Mobile Financial Services depends on which business model wins the day, and which part of the value chain you are addressing. In some scenarios the Mobile Operators command a larger share of the overall revenues, in other scenarios financial institutions take the lion’s share. There are also other scenarios where a central co-coordinating function, the Trusted Service Manager or TSM, will make money. My overall conclusion is that for service providers and application developers, the Cross-Border Mobile Remittances market offers the best opportunity, based on potential ROI and r...