Week 5 - Mobile payment system in Malaysia: Its potential and consumers' adoption strategies

Mobile payment or knows as M-Payment is a service that can make transaction through a mobile device, such as a cellular telephone, a Smartphone or a personal digital assistant ( PDA ). This type of service is 1st introduce in Malaysia by TeleMoney, the country's first mobile payment service via multi-channel access for Internet and wireless transactions, was launched on 20 November 2001.

The potential in mobile payment first, the customer need not to carry money or credit card to make transaction because the transaction is done by using the mobile phone to purchase the digital goods and ticketing. This kind of mobile service works on any mobile and the most important is that it eliminates the hassle to queue up just to pay bills in the busy lifestyle now. The mobile payment providers have a large market share to be grabbed on. This mobile payment system is still new and developing in Malaysia and for sure it will continue to grow as consumer’s confidence on mobile payment increased.

For consumers’ adoption strategies adopted in Malaysia, most of the company will reward the consumer by giving gift at certain level of purchasing or giving redemption of reward as a step to promote the consumer to utilize mobile payment service. For example, one of the telecommunication organization Maxis will give extra credit to its Hotlink customers. The call and receive duration accumulated will be calculated as point and when the point reach certain level it can be redeem to free air time or free sms.