Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Smartphone Wallets


An Easier Way To Pay?
You already depend upon your smartphone to update Facebook, access your email, introduce you to new music, remind you to buy an anniversary gift, and pick your lunch spot. Oh, and to make phone calls. In the coming months, you may begin to rely upon that same smart phone as a wallet.
These smartphone-based payment systems generally make use of near-field communication (NFC) hardware on board to communicate with a merchant's system in a contactless way. Get close enough, and through a simple transaction on the smartphone you pay for your purchase using credit cards you've enrolled in the service. Since the transaction involves a screen, ads and offers or coupons can be a part of the process and can help to offset the costs of operation.
There have been some smaller entries, but Google made the first big splash in the smartphone payment system space with Google Wallet, back in the fall of 2011. It’s designed to work with Citi cards and will be available for certain smartphones that use the Google Android OS. Isis is the new player in the mobile wallet space. It’s a joint venture from AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless and will let consumers load their eligible cards into their Isis Mobile Wallet. Chase and Capital One are already on board.
What would it take to convince you to try one of these systems? Any reason for you to prefer it to a physical credit card? Do you foresee a day when you wouldn't have to carry a wallet at all, but instead rely upon your smartphone for everything currently in your physical wallet?
Please leave a comment and share your thoughts. 
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1 comment:

  1. As with each iteration of digital change, it seems hard at this stage to see that enough POS would have the devices ready to work with this ... but then the 18 month rule of processing power increase also seems to apply to ALL aspects of technical change. Another way to look at it is the 90% rule: most of what we need to pay for probably will be able to be taken care of using these devices and apps, soon.

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