Japanese office worker Satoshi Tada pays for shopping, wins free food and gets store discounts all by waving his cellphone.
“I use it pretty much every day,” the 25-year-old said. “You can charge money on it right there if needed, and you don’t have to run around trying to find an ATM. You can even get points because it’s linked to credit cards.”
Top firms such as Visa Inc and Nokia are still mostly testing phone use for payments, but in Japan, more than 50 million, or about half of all cellphone users, already carry phones capable of serving as wallets.
Japan has pioneered the technology and the business models that will pave the way for wallet phones to become a standard payment method in the future. Some 700 million people worldwide are expected to own such phones by 2013.
“You can’t deny that having such applications on a phone is convenient, and that will likely be the way that mobile phones are going worldwide,” said JPMorgan Securities analyst Hironobu Sawake in Tokyo.
“People always carry cellphones on them, and they would find it useful to have a financial function there.”
Success in Japan and in trials abroad have shown that the technology is ready for cellphones to replace credit cards and cash, and serve as movie tickets and electronic keys for homes and offices.
But there are other hurdles, from breaking the psychological barrier for consumers skeptical about using phones as credit cards, to working out new business models as the lines blur between banks, financial institutions and cellphone companies.
Japan is leading the way in this regard.
KDDI, for example, is a Japanese telecom operator that has recently set up a bank along with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest wireless carrier, offers credit cards and lending services as part of a tie up with Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Japan’s third-largest bank.
Outside Japan, telecom industry and financial players are still in the midst of working out how the wallet phone payment business would operate, who would get a cut and when.
“Traditional financial industry met telcos by going mobile. Now telecom operators want to play a part in that chain. These talks are well under way,” said Gerhard Romen, director for Strategic Alliances & Partnering at Nokia.
The world’s biggest payment card company, Mastercard, said last month it was in talks over commercial launches of phone wallets with several banks. During the next two years it expects to see substantial activity from retail-focused banks.
“Now banks say: I have no doubt in the technology. We need to solve the business model between mobile and payments industries. It’s not a trivial task,” said James Anderson, a vice-president at Mastercard’s mobile business.
“There is a very strong consumer pull for this service.”
Tada, the Tokyo office worker, rarely pulls out his leather wallet these days as his cellphone does the job instead.
“For shopping, I use it everywhere I can ... and I also use coupons wherever possible,” Tada said, citing services at some restaurants that offer coupons and free gifts when customers wave their phones at reader terminals.
NTT DoCoMo began the so-called “wallet phone” service in 2004 and rivals KDDI Corp and Softbank Corp have followed suit. Overseas, Nokia also has such phones on the market.
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