I attended last night the 2nd Mobile Monday Switzerland hosted at EPFL. Topic was about Mobile Payment. More than fifty persons (out of 70 “subscribers” to Momo Swiss) were attending this session which is less than in other part of the world but not so bad for a 2nd edition in Switzerland. Mainly business oriented crowd, not much students (I saw only one) despite the fact that it was at EPFL.

Slides should be available but here are a few remarks (mainly useful for myself :-)

• Prof. Yves Pigneur presented examples of successful mobile paiement (in Japan of course) and failure (in Switzerland with Postfinance of course… :-).
• Simon Cavill, CTO of Mi-Pay. Mi-Pay provides “an innovative range of products and services that enable consumers around the world to undertake safe and secure financial transactions from their mobile phones”. Based in UK they work essentially in Africa. They do take into account that on developped country not everyone has a computer at home, but almost every one has access to a mobile. The crowd is split into 3 parts: those who have a mobile in their pocket, those who do not, and those who share it! Money is the airtime! Airtime is used in transaction.
• CTO of Vipera introduced their solution, even though it supports multi-channels, they focus on rich-client which provides the best user experience.
• Dennis Flad from Credit Suisse preenting the Swiss Mobile Payment Initiative. Consortium includes Swisscom, Telekurs, Visa, CS,… Goal is to replace low-value cash transaction. He presented, with a live demo, a mobile paiement solution that uses existing infrastructure together with a NFC system that works with both credit card and mobile device. Neat but I found very disapointing that with all the actors involved they can not come up with a better solution that would be deployed earlier than 2010, 2011.
• Missed the presentation from HP

Remarks
I guess it would be nice to respect the schedule as some people might be on a tight schedule (we started more than half an hour late) and the networking part (after) could be improved as it is an important part of such event. Would have been nice maybe also to start with someone going through an overview of the topic for those not fluent in mobile paiement.
(those are remarks to improve the event and not to criticize ;-)

What exactly is mobile payment ? Is it about micro-payment ? about paying with your mobile ? about paying in a nomadic situation ? from yesterday night it was not clear… maybe a bit of all of them.

Where is WiFi network in the picture ? mobile operator often pops up but what can WiFi provider do for mobile payment (knowing that 1 billion wifi enabled device are expected to be on the market in 2012)

More information and resources
mobilemonday.ch (I have been the owner of this domain name for at least 3 years,… and released it last year I believe :-)
janondrus.com
A blog about mobile payment: mobilepayment.typepad.com (in french)