Investments and acquisitions in the Mobile banking supplier industry during the past six months reduced the number of serious independent suppliers to a handful. With the large investment of Nokia in Obopay (remember a Nokia Executive now sits on the Obopay board), the acquisition of paybox by Sybase and now the big investment of Visa in Monitise only a few independents remain. Only Fundamo, Uthiba and a few others can still claim full Independence in this industry.Why is it important to license technology from independent suppliers?
Lets look at a few scenarios. In the case where a customer wants to offer a solution on any handset (not just Nokia), or run on any message platform using MasterCard (for instance), the choices are now even more limited. In selecting any of the listed suppliers, a clients cannot be sure that the selection of Handset manufacturer, Credit Card supplier etc. was done in the best interest of the client. These suppliers will now inadvertently be influenced in their decisions to consider the interests of their shareholders. This is not the best place to be.
The questions is: How important is independence in this game, especially at a stage when so many changes can still be injected into the market?