Ericsson launches merchant wallet service

Aiming to give consumer brands to tools to launch their own mobile payments products.

Ericsson is, of course, a longstanding giant in the mobile payments space, powering PSMS, on-bill and credit card payments for telcos and app providers.

But it's broadening its target with this launch to give large Internet brands and merchants the ability to launch their own consumer-facing wallets with features such as payments, virtual currency transactions, loyalty points, person to person money transfer and micro loans

The launch is one of two unveiled by Ericsson ahead of MWC next week.

The other is Ericsson Converged Wallet, which can convert the accounts of over a billion consumers already on the Ericsson Billing & Charging Solution to m-wallets. It says users who have 'first generation' m-wallet voice accounts (pre and post-paid accounts), can now be converted to 'next generation' m-wallets.

Adam Kerr, head of m-commerce at Ericsson, said: "This is an exciting time for the m-commerce industry, which is expected to process over USD 800 billion globally by 2016.