Mobile wallets' real power lies beyond payments: Research

Beijing, April 18: Mobile e-wallets are slowly being morphed into rich customer engagement platforms, thus offering reach and the opportunity for marketers to borrow mobile moments to better serve their customers, a Forrester research said on Tuesday.

Alipay and WeChat in China show marketers the future of mobile wallets.

While mainstream Western mobile wallets primarily focus on payments, pioneer mobile wallets in China have taken aggressive steps and become powerful customer engagement tools with innovative features such as WeChat's social gifting and Alipay's augmented reality (AR) coupons and red packets.

"Emerging mobile wallets will develop features like Alipay and WeChat. We expect mobile wallet innovations to happen more quickly in emerging markets with less legacy and competition. Paytm in India is a good example," senior analyst Xiaofeng Wang said in a blog post.

The successful marketing use cases developed on Alipay and WeChat Wallet will inspire third-party players like Apple and PayPal to morph their mobile wallets into more powerful customer engagement platforms, Wang added.

The marketers need to smartly leverage the mobile ecosystem to borrow mobile moments from the popular apps that their customers already use every day, the analyst suggested.