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Will Mobile Wallets Replace Their Traditional Counterparts?
Cara_Latham writes "Mobile wallets are all the rage. But legitimate questions remain as to whether they will ever truly replace their leathery counterparts. Mobile wallets, which use NFC-based technology to allow customers to make contactless payments at the point of sale, already have begun to make their presence felt. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google launched a digital wallet this past fall. The search giant has agreements with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover to make the Google Wallet available to the card companies' account holders, and there even are some NFC-enabled terminals in use across the U.S. that can accept it, including at many mass transit stations. And mobile wallet ventures are cropping up around the globe, as well. Telecom companies including Vodafone and Telefonica announced this year wallet initiatives in Africa and Latin America. But mobile wallets still face many hurdles before they can gain widespread adoption, experts say, including the rather difficult task of getting consumers to change long-held habits."
My wallet is already mobile.
Anonymous Coward
I'm 47 and have never owned a non-mobile wallet. Not sure what the point would be.
My pessimistic view is 'yes', the 'but' is; but not for me. For the same reason I buy printed books and like to have vinyl LP's and CD's on the shelf. The tactile and visual pleasure of those 'crisp green ones' (in Australia, that $100 bills are green) is something I would not like to give up. Nor would I like to do away with the symbolism of the US$1 bill, or the history of the British pound.
the day I'm forced to. This sounds like a really really bad idea.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Maybe it's just me, but I've been using cash more and more over the last 15 years or so. Just to restore the basic privacy we all had before OnStar, Google Stalking and street cameras. NFC here is just Google doing what's good for Google, and, well, I just finished switching all my clients to duckduckgo.com, take the hint. Ripping out all the Google Maps stuff next.
One thing I learned working with genomes of pathogenic microorganisms is that unless you are virologist studying rabies, you should avoid rage at all cost.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
My wallet has so many cards in it that it's thick. Add 1.5 mm up again and again, and it's not hard to get something with some thickness. Now, place that under only one side of your butt, and sit on it for a while. Also, I would add, be fit and have very little body fat for cushioning. In no time at all, you'll be uncomfortable.
I've cut back as much as I can, but I travel for business (so that's two cards), have a joint account for household expenses (one card) a credit card for personal use (another card) and a debit card which I use the most (another card). Other things, like a driver's license and health insurance cards...those need to stay. But how I have longed for a solution to move some of those cards out and have them in some other format, so that instead of these rectangles of plastic to represent what is essentially a very short piece of data, I could have it piggyback on a device I already own.
And that's an NFC-endabled smartphone. I get it. I want one.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Instead of a cool "wallet" thing, how about a credit card that I can pre-load with cash so I don't have to carry my other credit cards / debit card in case my physical wallet is stolen?
And so I can feel safer making on-line purchases with non-major sites.
Just so that the most that can ever be stolen is whatever I have pre-loaded.
You know, like Europe has had for years?
I have only one word to respond to that ---
Human Engineering
(It's two words actually, but it sounds much more dramatic to say one word...)
How easy would it be to watch Barbie or Kelly type in their PIN number at the gas station, a shoe store or the Clinique counter. Phones are popular theft items to begin with.
As soon as they make it easy to use them for totally anonymous purchases - Which includes the funding side of the wallet as well as the use.
Right now, however, we already have something almost as good - The Visa Gift card. You can buy them with cash, you can use them almost anywhere, you can't ever go over your "limit", and since they have no name associated with them, it makes no sense to ask for ID at the point of sale (though make no mistake, I've had salesdrones ask for it - Who then completely failed to explain what, exactly, they planned to compare my ID against, in the absence of a signature, name, picture, address, or anything else meaningful).
They have only one major flaw, entirely artificially imposed by the US's bizarre hatred of gambling - You can't easily recharge them. You have to pay the "convenience" fee to pick up a new one, with a fixed predetermined limit. Instead of, for example, "buying" your groceries plus a $1000 recharge for $1000 plus the cost of your groceries (paid in cash from my monthly visit to the ATM, of course).
Fix that, and I'd basically give up cash altogether. Make these some sort of "help Uncle Sam track even your cash purchases" deal, and thankyouverymuchbutno.
If I was a credit card company, the last thing I would do is cooperate with NFC. It holds the promise of money moving from bank accounts to retailers smoothly without the banks having to mess with a CC affiliation. Banks could even let you buy things on credit if they wanted.
This has tremendous potential to diversify the electronic purchasing world. Any small bank that can get certified can offer service worldwide. The achilles heel is the NFC protocol that brokers the transaction between the retailer and the bank. Is it too much to ask to have an open standard, instead of a mandatory Google/Verizon/Apple account? The last thing I want is to trade one unnecessary middleman for another.
Have gnu, will travel.
I always dreamed of paying expensive fees on every cash transfer I do. Giving a big company the freedom to stop me from using my wallet whenever it's convenient to them and with great benefit of making recording my purchase history easier than ever before makes this truly perfect. Consumers everywhere rejoice for this opportunity to show our devotion to corporate control!
I get strange looks at the checkout these days when the staff see my credit card with a hole Drilled right through the RFID chip.
When I got my new card it came with this "Pay Wave" feature which they claim is more secure and also convenient (wireless).
EXCEPT that for any EFTPos purchase less than $100 you dont need to enter a PIN.
Basic Security is that you should have a Physical Thing and a secret.
This removes the secret! Hence anyone in possesion of my card can repeatedly buy $100 worth of stuff with my money, and most likely before I have a chance to report it stolen. whereas they are extremely unlikely to guess my pin in 3 attempts before its gets locked out or I report it stolen.
Now I know that the bank has insurance etc and will pay it back. but why need to go through all that hassle when its so easily prevented by existing means.
Legitimate questions would be much less like "Is water wet?" or "Does the Mayan calendar not actually predict the obliteration of the Earth in 2012?" or "Will Apple and Google and a few million /.ers running Kubuntu drive Microsoft into irrelevance and bankruptcy by 2015?"
The physical wallet is not going away. As long as there are legal purchases for which many people would prefer to have plausible deniability, there will be cash. Until the final merger that yields AppFedGoocrosoft, L. L. C., Our Beloved Planetary Government, (with 51% of voting shares held by Goldman-CitiSachs of America, and the financial equity held mostly by the Bain/Koch Group and the LDS Church Inc.) those of us not standing in line to be rendered into spare parts and raw biodiesel input will need some way to hold a half-dozen competing trackable-money tokens, a dozen merchant "savings club" cards, blank bits of thermal paper that used to be receipts we thought we should keep, and enough paper money for a Big Mac, a USA Today, a pack of smokes, and an hour of high-res porn on the medium du jour.
There's the benefit of making your phone the target of hackers everywhere. The reason mobile malware hasn't been nearly as successful as PC malware is there hasn't been enough profit motive. Just wait until mobile phones all have wallets that could give thieves access to billions of dollars of credit. You want incentive to create malware? You'll get scads of professionally written free malware.
There's also the convenience benefit of using a cell phone to pay. Instead of all that hard work of getting your card out of your wallet and swiping it, you simply get out your phone, unlock the keypad with your simple code, find the simple wallet app and tap on it, simply wait for it to load and to prompt you for your PIN, then you simply tap your phone on the NFC reader! Simple, no?
Finally, there's the privacy benefit. If you use Google Wallet, now Google can complete their trifecta of intelligence gathering. They'll know what you search for, they'll know where you surfed to research the thing, and now they'll know when you walked into a brick and mortar store and bought it at retail even after all that on-line research. Google will know everything about commerce everywhere. And if you tell them you're opting out, they won't maintain that association with you, just your habits. How much more privacy could you want?
Was that enough benefit for you?
John
I've seen the Green Dot ones and their fee structure is fucking ridiculous if you want to use it as just a re-loadable card instead of having your pay check deposited to it. Which kind of defeats the idea of "re-loadable".
The best I've found is Western Union's. And even that has a few hoops I have to go through to put cash on it.
Again, Europe has had this tech for years. If I want to lend someone 50 Euro I can do that electronically.
What if your wallet is stolen? Same thing. Call your credit card companies and cancel the numbers.
My mobile phone can't replace my wallet because then where would I carry this Trojan I've had since I was a sophomore in 1976?
It's been with me since the bi-centennial, handed down to me by my cousin Frank who got it from his dad's drawer. And if I should ever get lucky, I want to be prepared.
Hey, it could happen...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Law Bans Cash for Second Hand Transactions
Cold hard cash. It's good everywhere you go, right? You can use it to pay for anything. But that's not the case here in Louisiana now. It's a law that was passed during this year's busy legislative session. House bill 195 basically says those who buy and sell second hand goods cannot use cash to make those transactions.
http://www.klfy.com/story/15717759/second-hand-dealer-law
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Randomize the keypad layout, that would solve the finger smudge pattern issue.
Call them on what, my leather wallet?