U.S. businesses invent roadblocks to using cellphone as credit card
Consumers in the United States will not be able to pay for purchases by waving their mobile phones in front of a reader anytime soon because of a dispute over how to split the revenue.
The Japanese have been using the technology for five years to pay for train tickets, groceries, even candy in vending machines. And in small trials around the world, nearly everyone has liked using this form of payment.
“In Japan it was easier,” said Gerhard Romen, director for corporate business development at Nokia. “It was just the major guys saying, ‘This is how it will be.”‘ A single carrier, NTT DoCoMo, accounted for more than half the Japanese market at the time the system was rolled out and thus had significant leverage with financial institutions and phone manufacturers…
This is not the case in the United States. For such payments to work there, cellphone manufacturers, carriers, financial institutions and retailers must all play roles. There must also be a trusted intermediary to activate the virtual credit cards inside the phone…
“At the end of the day, the question is, ‘Who pays whom and how much?”‘ Romen said. “The carriers and the banks need to get their act together on payment.” He called the back-and-forth a necessary step in the creation of a complex system…
It is completely possible nothing will happen in mobile payments in the next five years”…because each greedy bastard is afraid someone else will make a penny more than they do.
