In continuation of the m-banking focus from earlier this week, two more developments which caught my eye and this time in developed markets.

The first was an investment of $100 million in cMoney, a Houston based mobile technology firm by AGS Capital Group Essentially the service allows money transfer as well as payment for goods and services via the mobile phone. The firm will be launching their application on the iPhone, Blackberry and Andriod platforms. In March of this year, they had received $15 million from the Kodiak Capital Group. So that’s an investment of $115 million in a company which really doesn’t give much information on its website.

Some of the quirks in the coverage which make me wait for more information. They say:

• The company is looking to launch their mobile payment platform for financial services – does that it mean it’s a service that is being launch for financial institutions aka a virtual wallet for particular bank accounts
• The application includes patented security technology – more please
• They have developed a new and innovative way to send money and pay for goods and services using a cell phone and the text messaging system – hmmmm.....

The second development which caught my eye was AT&T’s tie-up with Apriva that provides mobile payment applications. In fact, they are quite a market leader in mobile payment processing. The interesting bit here is that the application turns smartphones into point-of-sale devices that accept credit and debit cards.

I’ve often felt that the problem with NFC enabled mobile phones is not that they are not wide-spread but rather that the readers are not wide-spread (yes - i am aware that this sentence would never have got past my english teachers in school with its deluge of negations!). After all, who will take on the onus of distribution of the readers – the bank or the operator? So now there may be a way around the dilemma.

There’s much more to the company – it is totally worth a dekho.