Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Mobile Payment Systems in Japan and Korea
I have no doubt at all that we will be using our mobile as both our primary device to access the digital world (overtaking the PC) and our primary means of paying for remote and physical purchases. A lot of our conversations with experts in context-awareness over the last few months have confirmed this.
One application I've been thinking about recently that could pull together a lot of trends aiming towards mobile devices as a central platform for context-aware computing are mobile payment systems. And that's when I ran across a really interesting analysis over at the Mobile Weblog, which projects a timeline of10 years for widespread global adoption of mobile payment schemes.
However, I think this may be a bit long, especially for Asia, where mobile payments are taking off -very- rapidly. I saw quite a bit of mobile payment systems in use in Korea last summer - there are 2 or 3 competing systems for doing retail POS payments. The government even uses embedded RFID in handsets to let you pay for trains, buses, and taxis through a system called T-Money. Also, a lot of websites let you bill micropayments to your cell phone, and they send a verification code by SMS that you need to enter on the site to complete the transaction.
It's hard to get accurate statistics on diffusion in Korea, but the RFID in Japan blog reports that the BitWallet system in Japan just passed the 1 million user mark. In Korea, nine banks launched a system for mobile-to-mobile payments that doesn't even require RFID, just the recipients telephone number.
Scanning the English language media out of Northeast Asia though yields stories like this on pretty much a daily basis. Mobile payments really do seem poised to pose a serious threat to the cash economy.