Last month, I spoke at the Mobile Payment India 2011 – 3rd International Conference held at Taj Lands End, Mumbai. The conference was attended by nearly 200 attendees including mobile payment service providers, Banks, Telecom companies and regulators.
The primary focus was on the roadmap for M-Payment services roll-out for the huge consumer base in India. Leading payment service providers and banks came together to showcase their concrete and innovative mobile payment solutions.
In panel discussions on ‘Future of M-Payment in India and Service providers’ perspective’, lots of new ideas and perceptions were shared by leaders from Aadhaar, MTNL, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications and Axis Bank. There were interesting discussions on exciting Mobile payment success stories and growth prospects in Indian market.
One of the key concerns was about Mobile payments standardization of policies, deployments, revenue models for service providers and banks, which are critical to make M-payment services a success. The second key concern was about security issues and risks in mobile payments eco-system.
Everyone agreed on security risks involved in this eco-system, but not too many sessions were there on how to mitigate these security risks. Surprisingly, the only one who spoke about Mobile security risks and mitigation was me.
My session was on “Mitigating Security risks in Mobile Payment Applications”. It covered the concerns around major security risks in Mobile payments communications channels and payment application design flaws. The session focused on the trends in security risks and challenges involved and best practices to mitigate these security risks and challenges.
The outlook for Mobile payment in India seems bright, as long on companies take care of security. Secure Mobile payment applications would be main attentive feature to attract and build trust among mobile payments’ larger customer-base.
