We managed to secure a brief interview this afternoon with Tony Moretta, director of mCommerce for Everything Everywhere, to ask him about the mCommerce Joint Venture announced yesterday between Everything Everywhere, Vodafone and O2 in the UK. We asked him first how long it had been in the offing. 

“We have been in discussions for a number of months,” he said. “You’ll appreciate that to get three organisations of this size to the point we reached yesterday takes some time.”

The next obvious question was why 3 UK was excluded from the JV. “You have to strike a balance,” Moretta told us. “The more companies you get involved, the slower it will be to co-ordinate things and get through the clearance process.”

But he insisted that 3 should not feel disadvantaged by its lack of involvement.

“We are open to other MNO and MVNOs as customers in exactly the same way that we will be customers. To get through this clearance process, we are going to have to be as clear as we have been so far in treating everyone equally. This is a fully-functional, arms-length JV, and we have to be able to demonstrate this as we go through the clearance process. 3 put out a statement about making sure they would not be disadvantaged in terms of when they can launch services. Well I can say categorically that they will not be – 3 will get access to the services the JV will offer at exactly the same time as we will as customers of the JV.”

Next, at the risk of asking a dumb question, we asked Moretta for the reasons behind the creation of the JV. He told us: “There are two key areas. Firstly, advertising and mobile marketing is a nascent market, and if we are to grow that and compete with other media, we have to make it as attractive as possible to advertisers and consumers in terms of the proposition, and the best way to do this is to have a one-stop shop for advertisers to make it easy to reach mobile customers. At the moment, they have to deal with different technologies and approaches.

“Secondly, the mobile wallet and NFC is a new way of doing things. It requires a new customer behaviour, and if everyone has a different approach to doing that, we do not think it would be a success. The JV will be a single body to promote the use of the mobile wallet and NFC in retail outlets.” 

So how tied is all this tied is to NFC? Most people seem to agree it’s the future, but it’s not really the here and now of mCommerce is it?

“It is complex and there is a wide scope, but we have focused on a few key areas people are interested in,” says Moretta. “It will take a while to increase NFC handset penetration, but one reason for doing this is to demonstrate our commitment to the handset makers to come out with more and more handsets. But we will see some services that do not use NFC, such as coupons, and online wallet services where you use a mobile wallet to make payments online.”

And what of privacy, and security?

“Privacy is very important,” says Moretta. “We want to make sure that as well as offering this to the customer, we protect the relationship with them, and give them control of how they are marketed to, how often they are marketed to, and how easy it is for them to stop the marketing communications. We understand the concerns about security too, but we believe that having the wallet on the SIM gives the strongest physical and electronic security.”

Finally, we put it to Moretta that this combination of the mobile operator’s billing relationship with its customers, coupled with the idea of them using the phone to pay for everyday goods and services, with all the additional insight that offers, could be the Holy Grail. Couldn’t it?

“It could be,” he says. “But we are conscious that we have to get it right and demonstrate this to the industry and to consumers. This is why they will retain control of their data, rather than us not controlling access to it and giving it out to third parties. But if we can get it right, it will be a win/win for consumers and the industry, and no one is in a better position than us to get it right.”

David Murphy writes:
Credit to Everything Everywhere for putting up a senior-level interviewee at less than 24 hours’ notice. I’m not used to operators doing anything fast, so if this is a sign of what’s to come, it’s a good sign for this mCommerce Joint Venture.

Moretta talks convincingly about the openness of the JV to all-comers, and the fairness with which anyone wanting to get involved, including other mobile operators and MVNOs, will be treated. As he says, this will be a prerequisite for getting the green light from the regulators.

The only thing he said that I found slightly less convincing concerned the reasons for not including 3 in the JV; that the involvement of another mobile operator would have slowed things down. If he had been talking of some other mobile operators, it would have made sense. But as the first UK operator to offer flat-rate data on a mobile phone, together with Skype calling, as long ago as November 2006, that’s slightly hard to take.