Consumers in the Middle East will to be using their mobile phone as the main source of making payments within five to 10 years, according to an telecom industry consultant. “Ten years from now the mobile phone will be the primary means in which the consumer uses the phone to pay for services,” Anandan Jayaraman, chief product and marketing officer at the telecom consultancy company Connectiva, told Arabian Business on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. He pointed to the example of Africa, where mobile phones are already becoming the main source of payment. He said only 10 percent of Africans have bank accounts, while 30 percent have mobile phones and use them as their main source of banking. While he admitted that the infrastructural development will have to be put in place in the Middle East, he believed that strides were being made quickly to introduce mobile banking and finance. At the MWC, Nokia was demonstrating its Nokia Money application, which can be used to transfer cash payments from one phone to another. A spokesperson from Nokia said that while demand for the service was growing, users were unlikely to abandon cash altogether.
