Saturday, April 28, 2012

Rise of mobile wallets

Post contributed by Ben Daniel -

iPhones Replacing Cash?
  A "mobile wallet" is something that could be a part of our future, and there is really no reason to doubt it considering types currency have changed drastically and consistently over the last few hundred years.
  In an article from CNN, it was stated that 65% of responses to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey believe that people truly will have a way take care of "their day-to-day means of paying" with a "mobile wallet" by 2020.
"Whether it's paying for coffee with a mobile app, using more versatile apps such as Google Wallet or doing business using tools such as Square that turn phones into mobile cash registers, the adoption of mobile payments is clearly under way."
We all use our computers to make purchases and some of us, 38% of people in the survey, use our phones to make purchases already, but if you had an app or a mechanical device that you plug into your iPhone and could just swipe your debit card or credit card to pay for everyday things, life could be a little easier.
"By 2020, most people will have embraced and fully adopted the use of smart-device swiping for purchases they make, nearly eliminating the need for cash or credit cards. People will come to trust and rely on personal hardware and software for handling monetary transactions over the Internet and in stores. Cash and credit cards will have mostly disappeared from many of the transactions that occur in advanced countries."
I feel that if this is true, instead of having wallet with cash in them, we would all basically have Paypal wallets to middleman our bank accounts, but I don't think this could work, and like me, there are others critical of this innovation.
  Peter J. McCann, a FutureWei Technologies senior engineer stated, "The use of a simple string of digits that must be shared with any vendor with whom you transact is really a ludicrously insecure system that can and must change."
  I agree. If cash is taken away for the use of digital payments, then how do you pay for things at a garage sale, buy or sell a car without using dealership, or even drugs? Not that it is a bad thing to take cash off the street that is being used to deal drugs, but are illegal drugs going to disappear? No. So, if this innovation takes place, that means that you would be swiping your credit card to enable yourself to buy something from a friend. What about when your pay thousands of dollars to someone, how is the IRS going to understand what the payments were for?
  To me it seems like there is a future of change because two hundred years ago we were using pounds of silver to pay for things and now that's a ridiculous thought. But are we eight years away from cash becoming an after-thought?

Source - Experts: Most peope will make purchases by phones by 2020CNN Tech blog

1 comment:

  1. This post definitely compliments my Next Big Thing project, which was "Everything Going Mobile". Since the use of mobile devices has increased, marketers have to find a way to attract consumer's to their products. They would have create products that would be valuable to consumer's every day lives such as calendars, weight loss programs, emails and even Facebook/Twitter. I'm not surprise that the next target is the way people purchase products. I bought a pizza from Papa John's off of my mobile device this weekend. I think this idea will be useful and create a revenue for some companies but not everyone will not use a mobile wallet just like everybody does not own a debit card/credit card.

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