Mobile payments made simple as sending an SMS

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 22 December 2010 09:26

Business IT - Technology

While there are numerous technologies around designed to enable secure transactions via mobile phones, Finnish company BookIT claims to have the simplest of all - a proprietary variant of SMS called iSMS - and to have half the population of Finland already using it.

The technology is at the heart of a new mobile payment service developed by BookIT in conjunction with Microsoft and Finnish card and payment processing co-operative Luottokunta. It enables consumers to pay for services, tickets etc from their mobile phone simply by acknowledging an incoming text message, once their credit card has been registered with the service provider.

BookIT's iSMS requires no installation of software on the users' phone: users simply respond to SMS messages from the organisation using the BookIT service. BookIT says the key to the system is its patented Dynamic Dialog Matrix which is able to authenticate responses to outgoing messages by attaching a unique 'fingerprint' to each message that is used to authenticate responses and link them with the appropriate originating message.

Services provided using the BookIT iSMS technology are delivered from a DDM server that organisations can install in their own data centre, or a telco can install a DDM server and offer hosted iSMS services to its enterprise customers. The technology has been used by Finnish airline, Finnair, since 2003 when it became the first airline in the world to allow passengers to check in for flights via a text message.

According to BookIT CEO, Jukka Salonen, "The iSMS is already used by 3.7 million Finns in the form of various services. One of the most popular is undoubtedly Finnair's flight check-in service. The new development is that the iSMS can be used to pay for various services. Business travellers do not have time to queue up for additional services, and Finnair believes that its services will grow in popularity when they can be ordered and paid for conveniently on the phone."

Luottokunta CEO Heikki Kapanen, said: "It is not an ordinary text message, which is easy to forge; authentication is highly secure here. The payment transaction is always within the Luottokunta system, which makes Luottokunta responsible for data protection'¦Thanks to their ease of use and speed, mobile payments are suitable for repeated and routine payments, such as travel or cinema tickets, subscriptions, car parking charges, and vending machine and online purchases. For example, Finnair customers will be able to pay for onboard purchases or airport services by SMS."

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