ARM Community: The New Mobile Payment Battlefield: Carriers Vs. Card Companies? - ARM Community

We’ve been talking a lot at ARM about secure mobile banking. ARM’s TrustZone technology is already an integral part of the ARM Cortex™-A series processors which are currently being deployed in smartphones by many of the industry’s leading handset manufacturers, and earlier this year we announced a partnership with Giesecke & Devrient to take that one step further by integrating G&D’s Mobicore operating system.

So, while the technology to protect consumers’ mobile transactions has been moving along quite nicely at the chip level, there has also been a lot of activity at the point of transaction level. According to a piece in BloombergBusinessweek on August 2^nd, it looks as if we are set to see an interesting tug-of-war between the carriers and the traditional card companies for who will own a dominant mobile payment system. While the article is compelling, I’m not sure this is something that we need to create a battlefield around…

Being an ARM person, my natural inclination is to suggest collaboration between these camps – after all, Card companies have about a half a century of experience building payment networks that appeal to consumers. They’ve navigated the changes in online banking, mobile banking and the shift to debit card spending. It seems they would be a natural fit for evolving that system one step further. Carriers, on the other hand, have tight relationships with the customer and with the hardware manufacturers. Hardware, especially at the chip level, has a great deal to do with the security, reliability and ease-of-use of mobile transactions. The BloombergBusinessweek story does mention that updating mobile phones with embedded microchips to secure transactions would increase manufacturing costs by up to $15 per handset (data is attributed to the Boston Fed in the article). If anyone can manage to control or contain those costs – it’s the carriers, not the Card companies.

What are your thoughts? Will we be a mobile payment culture in the next 5-10 years? Will it be “pay by mobile brought to you by Visa,” or “brought to you by Verizon,” or both?

Ian Drew, Executive VP of Marketing, ARM, he joined ARM as vice president of Segment Marketing in July 2005 and was responsible for ARM’s worldwide segment marketing programs. In 2008, Ian was appointed as vice president of Marketing responsible for ARM’s corporate marketing strategy across the major markets such as mobile computing, mobile solutions and embedded. In 2009, he became EVP Marketing.

Before joining ARM, Ian worked at Intel Corp. for 14 years in various senior management roles around the world including Asia, Russia, Europe and the U.S. His last position was as GM of the Russia/CIS office in Moscow, responsible for all the sales and marketing activities in the region. Before his GM position in Moscow, he was running Intel’s telecom group in Asia.

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