Mobile Wallets & NFC

By Patrick Crompton, esynergy-solutions

The world is a funny old place, as I am half way through writing my latest blog about the demand for mobile payments skills when we get news that the majority of our contractors working on a major mobile wallet program are given notice. Regardless of what the real reason is for this, I firmly believe the demand for anyone with business knowledge around mobile wallets or NFC will carry on being strong for the next few years.

Here's why:

- Americans are expected to spend $90 billion through mobile payments by 2017. PayPal, Pingit (Barclays), Zapp (VocaLink) and numerous other mobile payments have launched successful mobile payments / wallets recently in the UK

- Mobile wallets and loyalty schemes will merge, just as O2 / Weve & Apple have done. Therefore these companies will be able to gather deep payments and behavioural data from customers and build even more brand loyalty.

- From a recruitment perspective, these skills are still seen as niche, hard to find and generally command higher daily rates than many other skills we recruit for.

- Lastly and most importantly, current payments infrastructure is outdated; debit and credit card fraud is on the increase in particular. Therefore my belief is their will be a lot of work in this market in the years to come.

What rates to expect in the next 12 months?

Project & Programme Managers will command £600-£900 p/d depending on business knowledge.

Architects & Business Analysts will command rates at between £500-£700 p/d.

Product Managers will command rates between £600 - £800 p/d

We have contractors working on varying rates due to contract length, seniority, skills and number of hours expected.

Jobs advertised

Between now and last year the number of adverts placed for jobs mentioning mobile payments, mobile wallets and NFC has increased by around 30% across the main job sites in the UK.

What skills should you be obtaining in order to get the best possible rates?

-           Business domain knowledge of mobile payments, mobile wallets & in particular how these integrate with loyalty programs

-          Mobile payments fraud and security

-          A strong knowledge of the associated technologies used to build these types of systems in particular open source technologies such as Java, Python, Scala, Erlang, NoSQL databases such as Neo4j, MongoDB, Cassandra & big data tools such as Hadoop and splunk. I believe many of the new mobile payments offerings will be developed using these technologies.

If you would like to discuss opportunities confidentially or are looking to hire IT staff then please get in contact Patrick.crompton@esynergy-solutions.co.uk

Hope you enjoyed reading this blog.