Near Field Communications. It’s been an ongoing debate for some years now but by stealth it has grown in credibility making it one of the big mobile stories of 2011 according to Tim Green at Mobile Entertainment.
Last year Barclaycard, Visa and Mastercard (to name a few) announced a move into the world of contactless payments. Whilst many handsets still have some way to go to enable the mobile wallet to be delivered in its entirety, the mobile operators and brands like Google are keen to use NFC for advertising and coupon based promotions in the short term. Basically it’s happening whether you like it or not and once its use has been embraced by consumers you can bet it will grow at exponential speed just like so many other mobile developments.
And whilst you may think the future of a fully loaded mobile wallet is a long way off yet, consider this: if your employees have a company mobile with NFC capability, who’s going to manage your mobile expenditure when they are able to make contactless payments with ease? With expenses hitting the mobile bill and not a credit card bill, are you ready to monitor these costs? And if not, how will you ensure that your VAT return doesn’t include mobile phone expenses that should actually be attributed to the travel and subsistence budget?
I doubt you’d be willing to give employees a credit card without controls in place to prevent misuse; but what about a new generation mobile?
Something to think about.
Image courtesy of kalleboo at flickr.com
Posted in Uncategorized
|
Tagged Contactless Payments, managing costs, managing telecoms spend, mobile billing, mobile devices, mobile management, mobile phone expenditure, mobile telecoms, Mobile Wallet, tcm, telecoms billing, telecoms cost management, TEM
|
Last week’s announcements from Apple, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, place even more prominence on the smart phone, but what does that really mean for the business user and more importantly, the business bill payer?
With 8 billion apps downloaded in 2010 and Gartner predicting that mobile-apps revenue will top $15bn in 2011 and $25bn in 2012, the smart phone market shows no signs of slowing up.
There are now more than 425,000 apps to download from the App Store and Android offers over 130,000, so smart phone users can find ‘an app for that’ whatever that may be.
But if you manage the company mobile bill, how do you ensure you’re not picking up the tab for a leisure app downloaded to a business phone (even if it is only loose change) especially as this changes the premise of the organisation’s VAT return?
Being able to analyse all items that appear on an individual’s company mobile bill and enabling them to select the items that are personal use is a must.
For those customers that don’t have the tools or the skills in-house, working with a specialist Telecoms Cost Management company, like Mala, can enable the easy identification of non-business related telecoms expenditure.
So if you’re rolling out smartphones to your employees it could be time to ensure that the company isn’t picking up the tab for personal expenditure. And guess what, there’s even an app for that.
Near Field Communications. It’s been an ongoing debate for some years now but by stealth it has grown in credibility making it one of the big mobile stories of 2011 according to Tim Green at Mobile Entertainment.
