Text-based payments support for the earthquake relief efforts in Haiti has been nothing short of phenomenal.  The donations were made simply by texting “Haiti” to a special number and this then shows up as a charge on the mobile phone bill.

The proof of the power of ‘easy’ is that by January 15th, $11 million in donations had been received via text donations alone.  At $10 per transaction, that comes out to an astonishing 366,000 mobile payment transactions per day.

In an on-line recording of a Q&A session, Calvin Grimes, banking technology provider Fiserv’s mobile solutions manager, made the point that, “if use of your mobile device to pay for something is harder than pulling out a piece a plastic, consumers aren’t going to adopt it”.  Calvin goes on to state that they will need some form of a value-add (such as mobile coupons or reward redemptions) to carry mobile payments forward – which makes a lot of sense.

It will be interesting to see if the current wave of text-based donations ultimately serves as a “tipping point”, ushering in a broader awareness of mobile payments.

The parallels to the B2B financial sector are valid. The ability to use existing interfaces makes mobile payments incredibly easy, with rapidly-spiking adoption as a result.

Adoption of mobile payments approaches that require customers to buy, install, learn and acclimatise to new mobile devices, software and more complex interfaces will obviously take that much longer. Simplicity, as so often the case, is the key to widespread market adoption.