If Nav has been the killer phone feature of late, M Payments seem set to dominate the conversation next year. Protagonists like Visa and Amex are finally getting their acts together; Paypal is integrated with Blackberry; even Bank of America has a handy personal banking app that may foreseeably allow direct debit; iPhone apps like Zenius enable merchants to process credit card transactions; and today saw Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey showing off “Square”, a card-swipe gizmo that plugs into the headphone jack (sweeeeet!) and syncs with a register on the screen.
There are at least two troublesome issues with most of these innovations. Firstly, why the hell has it taken them so long, given the enormous value to customers and profit to providers that the mobile wallet promises to deliver? (It’s no use blaming the carriers as usual). And secondly, driven by said profit motive, the sheer numbers of them, and so few of them compatible with anything else; in fact they give “niche” new meaning, when m-payment requires a mass market solution if ever there was one. New Media SNAFU alert! The prospects of confusion and inefficiency in this sector are mounting. Take Zenius and Square: while it makes sense to enable merchants to accept cards on the hoof (there are many more people with credit cards than there are with iPhones), the idea of plugging in a clunky piece of hardware does not exactly fulfill the NFC dream of being able to point your phone at any product, click OK and find it billed to your bank account when you get home. Then again, there were many detractors of Netflix as an antiquated model using snail mail and DVDs to combat online, green VOD, so maybe the pure digital route is not necessarily the best way to go, given the structural issues that have inhibited a smoother, integral solution coming to market to date. As some might put it, a screwed up system needs a screwed up solution.
But when it comes to scale, you can’t beat SMS. There are plenty more people with mobile phones than there are with credit cards. Boku’s payment via SMS is helping to monetize mobile gaming, and overseas M-Pesa takes it a step further by substituting $ for the virtual currency of billable phone minutes (though one can forgive the US carriers for being reluctant to open up de facto credit lines to customers here). The ideal basic solution probably comprises a combination of SMS with NFC, reflecting the duality of on-phone and external environments. Users will want to buy something when standing in a field 100 miles from the nearest ATM, where connectivity is the key, but can also use it on the move, where speed is the key, as with the Oyster card scheme in London or First Data’s service on the BART in San Francisco, where the phone reads RFID chips (commonly these days embedded in card-sized gels) at the point of purchase.
Not enough to do all this, without even feeling that money has been changing hands? For the true materialist, the consumer that must have everything, Red Laser turns your iPhone into an intelligent barcode scanner. So you can read the codes of products and not only buy them, but compare alternate prices and view similar products as well.