'Pay by phone' gets new meaning with Visa trial

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 27 August 2008 12:07

Your IT - Mobility

"In the future we may be able to provide even greater convenience and choice to our customers by giving them the ability to selectively add cards or accounts to their mobile phone when they choose," said David Thodey, Telstra group managing director, enterprise and government.

"As the technology evolves, we expect it will be possible for consumers to use their mobile phones to download electronic coupons tailored to their interests, monitor their accounts, make mobile Internet payments and access other applications that provide a compelling customer experience," added Chris Clark, Visa general manager, Australia and New Zealand.

Sounds good to me - except that hundreds of thousands of Australian mobile phones are lost or stolen annually. Still, that $A35 limit would probably stop the light fingered from running up too big a bill providing you quickly realised your phone had gone missing.

Judging by what's happening overseas, the limit is likely to be more like $A100 if and when the system is broadly rolled out

Call me old fashioned, but I'm not completely sold on the idea of swapping 'something I have and something I know' (card and PIN, or card and signature) for merely 'something I have'.

And hopefully, once this gets out of the trial stage the carriers will avoid repeating the mistakes of the first generation of mobile banking services and ensure interoperability and broad availability across banks, carriers and card brands.

Disclosure: the writer is a NAB shareholder.