AABP EP Awards 728x90

Forget the wallet – smartphone payments could be on the way

/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/BR_web_311x311.jpeg

Mobile phones could be poised to join the mainstream as a way to make payments, according to Mobile Commerce Daily.

Apple Inc.’s iPhone 5 is rumored to be imbedded with a near field communication (NFC) chip that would allow the phone to pay bills at the more than 750,000 contactless payment terminals already installed in the United States at retailers’ points-of-sale. The only missing component to the process so far has been an NFC-enabled phone to go with it.

“This is going to jump-start the mobile payments space – Apple can do this,” said David Eads, Atlanta-based director of product marketing at Kony Solutions Inc., in an interview with Mobile Commerce. “It has 160 million iTunes accounts that all have payments information associated with them, which is a huge market that is ready to go.”

He said NFC chips for mobile payments could potentially be a $6.5 trillion market.

The technology could create issues. Each phone could operate differently from an application-compatibility perspective.

Eads said Apple is likely to take a cut of every payment through its service, possibly as much as 30 percent of the transaction fee, which typically ranges between 1 percent and 3 percent of the transaction.