Mobile News Roundup! Mobile Payments, Banking, Marketing and Other Stuff!

From the big guys to the small guys- there's exciting stuff all over the place.

• Venmo came out and took a strong stand against the PayPal's of the world by offering a simplistic, easy to use P2P system. Although founder Andrew Kortina admits that there's a lot of value for the PayPal app
• Speaking of the little guys, TabbedOut (based in Austin, TX), has signed a deal with MICROS systems to enable its services to more than 330K systems in over 130 countries. Tabbedout has announced that it's raised $3.7M in venture backing, which brings its Series A funding to a total of $5.75M. Tabbedout's services features encrypted credit card information on users' phones
• Digimo also joins the mobile payments revolution with low-cost, rapid deployment solution. It's already available for immediate deployment worldwide, and only requires users to register for the service online (supply their preferred billing method and phone number), receive a PIN, and they're good to go. Primarily designed for online giants, credit card companies and mobile operators, this solution hopes to offer a service at retailers without requiring POS integration at each one
• Speaking of POS systems, the Justice Department just filed an antitrust lawsuit to stop Verifone from buying Hypercom and entering into anti-competitive contracts with Ingenico (largest provider of POS terminals worldwide). The department said that the proposed deal would substantially lessen the competition in the POS terminals in the US, resulting in higher prices and reduced innovation, quality, product variety and service.
• Citi Tap and Pay finally released their findings from a Bengaluru pilot in 2009. The pilot was rolled out to over 3K customers, 250 merchants and accumulated over 50K purchases in 26 weeks. Some of the highlights of the report indicate that secure/hassle free activation and enhancement in transaction speed scored positively with customers and encouraged usage
• And, if you've missed it, Google has announced that it's developing NFC solutions for retailers- working with Ingenico to develop NFC-based services for retailers. Google is hoping to deliver coupons, and currently has stated that it's not currently planning on moving into the payments sector, but it's really only a matter of time...

Moving back to the realm of mobile banking:

• Smart has begun encouraging customers to bank online (particularly in the bill payments section)-with an estimated 45.6M Smart subscribers as of December 2010, all consumers have to do is link their bank account to their mobile phones (one-time transaction) to allow for mobile banking services
• And in a funny (kind of) twist of fate, due to the big mobile push in Korea, banks have noticed that consumers are actually pushing back and (sometimes) preferring old banking methods. The press release states that "Because of growing concerns over security breaches in the banking sector, an increasing number of clients are shunning modern conveniences such as mobile and online banking services in favor of more secure 'security accounts'". In addition, these security accounts require customers to make financial transaction in person by physically going to a bank or through an automated teller machine (ATM). Internet and mobile banking is not permitted.