Category: Featured News

The industry cautioned that phone charge trade deal negotiations will be rather tricky.

When Brexit occurs, mobile roaming fees could skyrocket by an astounding amount for British travelers. In fact, the industry has cautioned that Brits that every song they stream could cost them €50 in roaming charges when the U.K. splits from the E.U.

This will occur unless the U.K. manages to negotiate a comprehensive free trade agreement following Brexit.

The E.U. has been campaigning against the existence of mobile roaming fees for more than ten years. They have lowered the amount mobile operators are permitted to charge. Moreover, they are leading to a nearly entire removal of mobile roaming charges by the summer of 2017. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron continually underscored this type of potential fee throughout the Brexit referendum campaigns.

When Brexit occurs, British travelers will no longer be covered by the protection from mobile roaming fees.

This will make it possible for European carriers to charge British travelers whatever they want for using phone, text and data services. At the moment, American travelers who don’t arrange for special data packages find themselves paying €10 per MB. This could soon be the case for people from the U.K., as well.

While this had previously been problematic before the limits to E.U. mobile roaming charges had been put into place, it is expected to be far greater after Brexit. The reason is that the last time carriers were allowed to charge whatever they wanted to British travelers, it was primarily for talk and text.

Now, people are using their smartphones for far more than that on a very regular basis. Keeping in mind that a single Spotify song is usually between 3MB and 5MB, non-EU mobile device users could pay exorbitant fees for mobile web use.

Mobile roaming fees aren’t the only costs that might change for British travelers to Europe. U.K. carriers may find that they will be charged higher line rental and other network fees by E.U. providers. This extra expense will need to be passed on to the customer, too. To avoid this, negotiations between the U.K. and the E.U. will need to be quick and careful.

The country’s effort to go cashless has led to an unprecedented growth in smartphone digital payments.

A new study predicted that the Indian mobile wallet market will experience a growth rate of more than 190 percent by fiscal year 2022. The forecast was made as a result of research conducted by Assocham, a trade organization, and RNCOS, a business consulting firm.

The prediction was that mobile payment transactions are likely to reach a CAGR of over 160 percent per year.

That rate will continue to increase from the current fiscal year through to 2022. At that time, the mobile wallet market will be worth 250 billion, said the prediction. That is a substantial increase over the current size of the market which is estimated to be just over half a billion.

The report on the forecast suggested that there are several reasons that the use of mobile payments in India is growing exceptionally quickly. To start, e-commerce as a whole is on the rise. This is a trend occuring worldwide. Moreover, mobile internet penetration is also growing rapidly, meaning that more consumers have access to these options than ever before.

That said, the mobile wallet market is rising faster in India than in most other areas of the world.

With rising smartphone penetration, the Indian environment is also aligning well for mobile wallet use in a way that is not being experienced in other areas of the globe. For one thing, there is an increase in disposable incomes. More people have money to spend on areas outside of vital essentials.

With all these factors combined with the country’s efforts to reduce the use of cash, people are turning to their phones to pay for products and services. This is, after all, a country that is greatly unbanked and in which it is not necessarily commonplace to have credit cards. Therefore, when cash is not an option, people are turning to the option they already have in their hands: mobile phones.

This has created a nearly ideal opportunity for mobile wallet market growth and it appears as though this will continue for at least another five years.