Is a digital wallet in your future?

Want to take the plunge and migrate one or more of your credit cards to your new NFC enabled Smartphone?  This will only apply to Smartphone users with either a Windows Phone or Android device (Apple has not yet embedded NFC).

What is NFC (near field communications)?  It’s the technology included in many new Smartphone’s and a few tablets that allows you to tap your device and process a payment / financial transaction.   In a nutshell, you eliminate the need of pulling your credit card out of your wallet.  While NFC also allows you to send different types of information to other devices (music, pictures, etc), it is also the technology that will be enabling commerce transactions with a tap of your device.

Software needs to be installed on your phone (I’ll get to that later as well), that allows you to submit your credit card information into the application (or cloud).

Google is pushing their application, called “Google Wallet” and Microsoft is promoting “Mobile Wallet” for Windows Phone 8.  These are not the only guys on the block.  A few other software vendors are working with credit card companies to provide similar services (software, merchants, and agreements). ISIS mobile is another such company:  http://www.paywithisis.com/

How and when will all of this really work?   Do you trust putting your credit card information into your device?    The first question is really the harder one… The how and when is finally starting to arrive, but not in the way most of us would want it.  The following merchants now have some stores NFC enabled and allow a customer to checkout/pay for merchandise via a Smartphone/tablet with software and an NFC enabled device:

http://www.google.com/wallet/how-it-works/in-store.html#merchant-matrix

http://makingmobilepay.com/tag/microsoft-wallet-hub/

Now for the tricky part…  Not all of these merchant gateway solutions work with each of the software solutions from Google, Microsoft, PayPal, ISIS, etc…    What does that really mean?  It means that if you have ISIS software installed on your Smartphone, put your credit card information into the application and the merchant doesn’t support ISIS NFC transactions, your shI$$&t out of luck…  The same holds for the other vendors as well…  Not a great situation…  

 

When Apple and RIM get into the game, things will just get worse, before they
hopefully get better…   Can’t we all get along?

Besides this being a little bit of a pain in the neck, many folks are still not comfortable storing their credit card information in their device…  While I think this fear is gradually changing, I’m still pretty miffed that the interoperability issue is not getting resolved quicker…  (Wallets are not cross compatible).  

How will this all play out?    A standard needs to exist or things will continue to be a mess.