Cash on delivery-mobile consumer management goes back to basics

Personal mobile services are becoming ever more sophisticated but the mechanisms of obtaining payment for those services are still built around customer accounts and consumer credit, two concepts that bring their own issues of risk and management overhead. Given sufficient bandwidth, imagination and entrepreneurism it is not difficult to envisage a future of mobile consumers accessing information, entertainment and services whenever and wherever the mood takes them. One of the biggest inhibitors to this vision is the need for customers to pre-register an account and conduct all sales on a credit basis: a limitation on which services are commercially viable and on who is eligible to access them. The ideal solution to these limitations is to conduct business over the air on a cash on delivery basis. Until now this has been no more than a fantasy but the arrival of true digital cash is about to change all that, The paper examines a digital cash replacement that becomes available to the public next year. It looks at the impact it will have on the mobile network operators and service providers and on the kind of services that can be economically sold over the air once payment ceases to be a problem