M-Payment systems: technologies and business models

In only a few ten years payment systems have undergone an incredible evolution passing from a physical transfer of cash to transactions exchanging money as digital data. Mobile Payment (m-payment) refers to one type of electronic payment, performed through mobile devices, such as mobile phones, smartphones, and tablets. To ensure trust and avoid frauds severe security requirements must be imposed. In addition, interoperability and privacy requirements, as well as speed of execution and ease-of-use are mandatory requirements, too. Several technical solutions have been proposed, associated to generally incompatible business models. From the end-users point of view, the result of a m-payment transaction is just one transfer of money from customer to merchant. However, to get this simple result, m-payments use a plethora of sophisticated technologies, including SMS, NFC, high-frequency sound waves, software apps. The heterogeneity of m-payment systems and economic models is an important challenge for their diffusion in the next years. Having described the main requirements, technical characteristics and different business models of m-payment, this paper underlines relationship of technological and business approach to m-payment systems.