Fed weighs future of contactless payments
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InfoWorld - You can call it &#39;cash 2.0&#39;: a new age of wireless payment technology that may replace even the smallest cash transactions in the coming years with the wave of a credit card or mobile phone.&#160;
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The Federal Reserve is close to agreeing changes in its communication strategy, including quarterly publication of internal forecasts, but it will not adopt an inflation target any time soon, Fed sources said on Friday.
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WASHINGTON - Americans may be disappointed the Federal Reserve's interest rate cut won't translate into lower monthly mortgage payments and a revival of the housing market.
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The practice of &quot;floating&quot; a check until payday will become a thing of the past Oct. 28, when the new federal Check Clearing for the 21st Century
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(InfoWorld) - Mobile payments and banking are now moving into the United States through some big names, but the speedy checkout system is slow to put in place. VisaÂ and Wells FargoÂ have finished the first phase of a trial of in-person mobile coupons, payment by phone, and over-the-air account management, the companies said Wednesday. They ran that test inside Wells Fargo's Customer Experience Research Lab, and the next step, starting in the next few months, will involve 30 to 50 Wells Fargo employees in the real world. Only after that second phase will the partners sign up actual consumers for a test. That third phase, involving 300 to 500 holders of Wells Fargo Visa cards, is scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year. Some U.S. consumers, including Wells Fargo customers, are already using their mobile phones for banking tasks such as checking account information and transferring funds. In-person payments by mobile phone, already popular in Japan and strongly backed by Finland's Nokia, have taken longer to reach the United States. The payments require a specially equipped phone and a payment device located in a store, restaurant, stadium, or transit turnstile. Wells Fargo and Visa, like Nokia, plan to use NFC (near field communications), though a different system is used by pioneer NTT DoCoMoÂ in Japan. NFC is based on RFID and can communicate over a few centimeters, or users can just tap the phone against the payment device. At the heart of the system is downloadable client software developed by Visa, which is already in use in South Korea, according to Peter Ho, a vice president and product manager at Wells Fargo. The trials by Visa and Wells Fargo go beyond just tap payments. In the second phase of testing, the Wells Fargo employees will be able to receive, store, and redeem mobile coupons; monitor their credit or debit account activity; and manage their funds on the phone. They will make NFC payments at merchants equipped for Visa's payWave system, which today lets consumers wave their Visa cards in front of a secure reader. It's the first system in the United States to combine mobile banking and payments, Ho said. "The customer is going to expect to be able to do both," Ho said. The consumer experience only needs to be fine-tuned, and Wells Fargo and Visa are enthusiastic about the technology, according to Ho. It's the business model that needs to be worked out, he said. For one thing, no mobile operator yet offers an NFC handset to its subscribers, the typical way U.S. consumers get their phones, he said. The two partners are talking with carriers and with providers of mobile payment infrastructure to set up a system that's attractive to all, he said. Ho would not speculate when all those pieces will come together in a commercial service. Competing technologies are holding back phone payments, according to In-Stat analyst David Chamberlain. Everyone involved wants to know they won't be stranded with a system others aren't using. In addition to NFC, some companies are advocating the use of text messages or barcodes generated on the phone, Chamberlain said. The best thing Visa could do would be to convince one of its own competitors to also use NFC, he said.
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Some federal employees are smarting over their smart-card treatment.
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Many 'contactless' credit cards can leak their owner's name and card number for reading at a distance.
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Will the carrier's call connect with consumers?
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A fourth interest rate hike may be a foregone conclusion Wednesday but the Federal Reserve&#39;s next move in December is far from certain, and analysts say it&#39;s likely to remain that way for a while.
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Bank of America online customers will soon be able to use their cell phones and smart phones to check account balances, pay bills and transfer funds.
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Verizon Wireless subscribers will soon be able to access "mobile money" using their cell phones, the cellular operator says.
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At a local neighborhood grocery store, customers may soon be able to pay for their purchases with a quick wave of their cellphone, doing away with the need for wallets, loyalty cards and even cashiers.
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(InfoWorld) - Nokia, one of the first handset makers outside Japan to turn a phone into a wallet, now wants to sell services that will make these kinds of devices useful. But the Finnish mobile equipment giant isn't doing so directly. Instead, it has formed what it calls an independent third party, a joint venture with Germany's Giesecke & Devrient, which makes smart cards. The venture, Venyon Oy, based in Helsinki, was launched in December and is about to open a Singapore office to complement locations in Munich and Dallas, according to Chief Executive Officer Lauri Pesonen. The mobile phone payments Venyon wants to facilitate are based on NFC (near-field communication), which uses an RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip and antenna to exchange information with a payment station from a range of a few centimeters. Typically it would involve tapping the phone against a subway turnstile, a vending machine, a payment device at a checkout stand, or another phone, Pesonen said. Phones are perfect for payment because people carry them almost everywhere, Pesonen told journalists at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. NFC is already available on some credit and debit cards, and NFC phones will get cheaper when they no longer need a separate smart card for the feature. Such phones should hit the market next year, he said. Like 3G (third-generation) mobile data services, NFC first got off the ground in Japan with slightly different technology, in this case Sony's FeliCa system. Now big names including Sony, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Visa International Service Association, and MasterCard International are backing the technology through the NFC Forum and there are trials taking place in several places around the world. But outside Japan and South Korea, there are few phones equipped to use it. Venyon isn't aiming at the hardware end of the problem but at the need for an infrastructure through which retailers and financial services companies can work with carriers and handset makers. Although standards bodies are working on specifications for this, Venyon is worried that the market will be in full swing by the time those standards are finished. If each set of partners develops its own technology, fragmentation would slow down adoption, Pesonen said. Venyon is offering services to support mobile NFC applications that can be downloaded and managed over the air. For example, a service that lets the user prepay for subway rides would involve the transit operator, the mobile carrier, a financial institution and software that needs to be downloaded to the phone. Venyon would provide that service behind the scenes, Pesonen said. OvumÂ  analyst Roger Entner thinks many people eventually will embrace payment by phone for its convenience. The practice might be even more popular in countries where consumers don't yet have credit cards, he added. But Entner is less worried than Venyon about fragmentation. The company wants to jump out ahead and grab market share, but more competitors means better ideas, he said. "I have great trust in the market forces," Entner said. NFC could well succeed but faces an uphill battle in the U.S., in the view of analyst Clay Ryder at Sageza Group. Fewer U.S. consumers make small, daily payments on transit systems. Phone payments initially would appeal most to people in their early 20s, he said.
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Many 'contactless' credit cards can allow their owner's name and card number to be read at a distance.
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Americans made more payments electronically than with checks in 2003, making it the first year electronic transactions surpassed paper payments, according to studies released Monday by the Federal Reserve&#39;s financial services policy committee.
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Slow crawl towards near field comms 3GSM Demonstrations of proximity payment systems, allowing users to pay for products with wave of the phone, have been around for years, and every year we're promised that this time it's really going to happen.â¦
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Consumers feel passwords no longer enough protection for online transactions.