American Express announces intentions to put $100 million toward the Serve digital payment system

Mobile Commerce Industry

Mobile Commerce Industry
The largest purchase-based credit card issuer, American Express Co., has announced that it will be investing $100 million into technologies that will help it to develop the Serve system for digital payment.

The New York-based company released a statement that said that it will be primarily making minority investments into “early state startups” that remain –for the moment- unnamed, for the purpose of developing products for mobile payments.

AmEx is aiming to create better traction for itself in the rapidly growing mobile commerce and mobile payments market. This puts it in direct competition with Google Inc., Visa Inc., PayPal, and eBay Inc. Mobile phone payments worldwide are forecasted to be worth $670 billion by 2015. According to Juniper Research, they will already have reached $240 by the end of this year.

Leader of the AmEx initiative, Dan Schulman, the company’s president of enterprise growth, said that they are well aware of the fact that they will not be able to do this alone. He explained that “The ability to identify the right technologies and the ability to partner with emerging technology companies is going to be crucial.”

American Express has explained that this year it is making deals to form an integration among Sprint Nextel Corp and Verizon Wireless mobile devices and the Serve mobile payment system. Schulman formerly worked at Sprint Nextel before he joined AmEx.

Schulman feels that there will soon be a complete redefinition of commerce. From now on, everything will become digitized, regardless of what kind of device is being used to seek information.

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