The idea of paying with your mobile isn’t exactly new or original. There was talk of using smartphones as wallets back when the iPhone 3G was released and when Samsung and other Android manufacturers started putting NFC chips in their phones it seemed inevitable that within a few years we’d be tapping our way through retail store checkouts.
Fast forward to now and the mobile payment machine is still grinding forward slowly and haltingly. Instead of there being one decided way to use mobile payments that’s just struggling to be adopted, as always there are many different options being thrown around as potential candidates for the mobile payments crown.
How Do You Want to Pay?
NFC is still on the cards but is still struggling to get widespread adoption due to Apple’s reluctance to incorporate it into the iPhone 5 and there’s as yet no real word on whether the next iPhone iteration will feature the chip. Mobile wallets are gaining traction through services like Google Now and Passbook, but people are, understandably, edgy about using their phone as the primary communications, geolocation, internet portal and financial centre of their lives. It feels a little too much like putting all the eggs in one basket and raises a number of security issues to boot.
For one, if someone hacks your phone, they have access to literally every piece of information that they could realistically need to steal your identity. This is worrying enough in itself, but it’s the potential for data mining and big data collection that’s raising the eyebrows of many when it comes to using mobiles as wallets.
As we just said, assuming you’re using your phone as a wallet, essentially every piece of important data that say, advertising companies, could want to know is all conveniently held in one place. Not only are your social connections and browsing habits on your phone, nearly every smartphone is GPS enabled so they know where you go and what your travelling routines are. Add into that your financial details and the markets know who you know, what you talk about (through keyword tracking), where you go and what you buy when you go there.
If you think this is something of an over reaction to the situation, remember that Target famously worked out a teenage girl was pregnant, before her father did, all through market research.
Mobile Payment Plans in Stores
Having said that though, on the other side of things, stores have started adopting mobile payment plans that are already showing strong adoption. The most famous of these is of course Starbucks with their mobile payments app that allows customers to pay for anything in store through their phones and even keep track of their “free drink” stars.
Walmart have also joined the ranks of those companies looking to make an impact in the mobile world with their “scan and go” app. It let’s customers scan the barcodes of everything they put into their trolley, as they put it in, and then the phone screen displays a singular barcode that the customers scans at the self-checkout and then pays for everything at once rather than scanning it all through seperately. This is obviously much quicker than going through the process of scanning everything after you’ve put it in the trolley, but the customer still has to pay at the checkout. Walmart have said they are looking into a “pay as you go” feature, but have no plans to implement it at the moment.
It’s a good indicator of where mobile payments are heading though. Instead of a singular wallet where you manage all your payments as with the days of old, you instead have a more fractured and fragmented set of abilities. In some ways this is good because stores can customise their payment services to their own businesses, on the other hand though, it also means that customers have to carry around multiple apps that do essentially the same thing as each other (not that that’s really unusual as it is to be fair).
What this disparity does mean, however, is that the floor is still open for app developers to create new and innovative solutions to this problem. The door is not yet closed, nothing is decided, so if you’re an app developer, now is a fantastic time to think about whether you want to take a stab at solving this problem and those like it in the mobile industry.
