Mobile Entertainment

On Monday credit card giant Barclaycard and the UK capital's transport authority TfL unveiled OnePulse.

It's a nifty little solution that combines TfL's existing pre-pay 'touch in, touch out' Oyster Card that most Londoners now use to pay for tube, rail and bus journeys with a regular chip and PIN credit card.

But more importantly, Oyster one-touch payment functionality has now been extended to retail courtesy of VISA's 'wave and pay' technology, so users can pay for goods and services under £10 without having to enter a PIN number or sign a receipt.

As such, OnePulse is the UK's first contact-less payment system and, at least for people that work and live in London, it'll mean less change required in pockets to pay for coffee, sweets and ciggies etc.

Put simply OnePulse is convenient. After all, the three things people step out of the house with in the morning are keys, phone and wallet. But not every wallet has a credit card.

That presents a potentially a huge opportunity for Payforit, as last night's excellent NOC seminar about the UK's new cross operator WAP billing scheme highlighted.

To recap, Payforit is an operator-mandated transaction framework that enables an off-portal 'click and buy' experience - like that of the wired internet - on mobile phones, charged to the user's phone bill.

It works for transactions up to the value of £5 (though that threshold will soon be extended to £10) and was ostensibly created to rebuild consumer confidence in off-portal transactions following the premium SMS ringtone rip-offs of a few years back.

Mobile content publishers appear to love Payforit. Unlike clunky PSMS billing it allows them to instantly monetise the growing amount of traffic being pushed to their WAP portals from search engines or Adwords etc.

Dialogue, one of Payforit's Accredited Payment Intermediaries (APIs), reckons like-for-like content transactions are up 27 per cent when compared to shortcode/WAP push-based purchases. Other APIs like Tanla, Ericsson, Netsize, Bango and WIN have reported similar upside.

Games publisher I-play, which has been using Dialogue-powered Payforit transactions on its WAP site since January, says 15 per cent of people that find its portal end up making a purchase.

Two reasons for this - firstly, the payment mechanism itself is more trusted than PSMS and, secondly, if people do find I-play's D2C site then they really REALLY want to buy a game due to the hoops they'll invariably have had to jump through to get there.

However, as D2see CEO/ex-Voda man Jeremy Flynn pointed out at the NOC event, there's a bigger picture for Payforit beyond mobile content. Obviously physical goods and services can be bought using the method in the same way they are on the web.

Furthermore, while Payforit can't offer the one swipe transactions enabled by OnePlus, there's also no reason it can't be used by merchants on the 'big' internet alongside other payment options like credit cards, PayPal or Google Checkout.

This is where Payforit's stakeholders need to grasp the opportunity in front of them, because those latter two giants of web payments are making their own moves into mobile and have the potential to steal the 'one click' initiative.

There are undoubtedly hurdles to be addressed in the Payforit system. Top of the list is the reluctance of one brightly-coloured UK operator in particular to bring its Payforit rev shares up to the level of PSMS.

But consensus is that time will bring everyone in line. As Flynn stressed, there's no point embarking down the Payforit road if the only objective is to screw an extra three per cent out of the content value chain.