Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

ARC Thoughts

This is a blog on architecture. Focus of this blog is to help technical decision makers with upcoming technologies so they can make informed decisions. Since I'm passionate about retail industry and payments industry, there will some bias towards those areas.
Next generation payments solution

During the recently concluded conference I was talking to architects, CIOs, CTOs and technical decision makers from variety of global banks and retail organizations. We were discussing what the next generation payments will look like. I think that NFC embedded Mobile payments will be the ultimate payments solution of future, in other words the mobile wallet which can replace the physical wallet is the way to go. Some attendees disagreed and their point was that it might work in North America, but not necessarily will work in the developing nations. Their point was that for developing nations we need a cheap solution where smartphones should not be a requirement. So they felt that a simple phone based or SMS based solution is the way to go. They felt that a customer calls a phone number, enters the amount and enters another phone to transfer funds to another phone account. There is no need for NFC chips in the phones. I still think that this use exprience of making phone calls may work in developing countries, but may not work in the developed countries where consumers like to not make calls if they don't need to and also the process of making calls will slow down the whole retail check-out process.

IMO, in North America, the NFC based mobile payment solution is the way to go, where it'll speed up the service, replace the physical wallet and provide additional services to consumers.

What do you think will be the next generation payment solution.

Posted: Monday, December 04, 2006 11:46 PM by mmoin

Comments

KevinKhelawan said:

Hi Moin,

I think many of the mechanisms will work more or less in different countries. As you say we discussed the fact that NFC is a good mechanism where there is a well developed retail banking and POS terminal infrastrcuture. For situations where such infrastructure is minimal then the use of SMS Top ups as a payment mechanism is a viable option. There is no infrastructure cost other than that provided by the mobile operator, which essentially is the core network and the top up systems for their pre-paid customers.

Think sidewalk vendors, nomadic merchants etc.

Great round table discussion though!

# December 5, 2006 10:07 PM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required) 

  
Enter Code Here: Required

Comment Notification

If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS

Page view tracker