The potentially lucrative business of cellphone wallets is waiting for banks and telecom operators to agree on each one's role and possible revenue flow in the future. Technology for paying with cellphones by just flashing them near reading equipment in stores or in public transport is ready, and consumers have appreciated the ease of its use in trials around the world.
The world's biggest payment card company, Mastercard, will unveil on Thursday (October 30) a service for banks, enabling them to install payment cards into clients cellphones much easier than earlier, possibly breaking the deadlock over the market takeoff. "We are talking to serious banks ... and not about trials, but about commercial launches," said James Anderson, a Vice President at Mastercard's mobile business. Anderson said that during the next two years he expects to see substantial activity from retail-focused banks, whose plans to develop mobile payment services have been little affected by the financial crisis. "We have not seen a lot of impact," Anderson said.
It would still take at least until 2010 before any wider availability of phones equipped with such technology and the financial industry and telecom operators would need to agree on some kind of revenue and role split.
"Traditional financial industry met telcos by going mobile. Now telecom operators want to play a part in that chain. These talks are well under way," Gerhard Romen, Director for Strategic Alliances & Partnering at Nokia, told Reuters.
"Now it's like the Olympics, everyone is on their starting blocks, and just waiting," he said. Consumers will be able to use a phone as a wallet or as an access card simply by waving it over a wireless reader, and in some cases punching a PIN number into the phone - similar to how travellers in Tokyo and London access public transport.
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