Master Thesis - Past Projects - Abstract

Design of a Mobile Payment Intermediary

ID: LiTH-IDA-Ex-02/108

This thesis describes how to design a payment intermediary for mobile services (PI). The PI is a function that replaces the many-to-many relationship between Mobile Operators and content providers when routing payments for mobile content over the users phone-bill or pre-paid subscription. The study was performed in Singapore and all conclusions have been drawn from a perspective based on the Singaporean market. The reasons for mobile commerce not taking off as predicted are many. This work includes an extensive study and discussion with numerous market players to pinpoint the main obstacles to market deployment. A major obstacle was found to be the inefficiency originating in the lack of a simple viable payment channel. The connections and contracting between operators and content providers is too complicated, both business- and technology-wise. The solution, the payment intermediary, solves this problem and creates a better environment for all involved parties in focusing on their core competence and collecting payments for their products. The systems architecture along with role definitions gives both a technical and business-case design of how this could be implemented. To further clarify the functions of the payment intermediary we have built a demonstrator which is described in the end of this thesis.

Keywords: Mobile payments Mobile Clearinghouse Payment routing Transaction routing

Author(s): Fredrik Ruben

Contact: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani