A rundown of the options for mobile payments

The number of articles on mobile phones and payments in US media has been increasing lately. Here is another one with some excerpts of note:

First, there are two ways of doing it

"Two primary options exist for the payment provider looking to place his tech inside a cell phone: integrate the process with the handset’s software, or simply treat the phone as a carrier for a chip."

Optinon 1:

"In the former, payment information would be stored in the phone’s memory, and consumers would activate a menu on the handset to enable payment. According to Gordon-Lathrop, this motif is attractive because it allows multiple cards to be stored."

Option 2:

"The other approach is to simply place a contactless chip inside the phone’s shell, enabling customers to wave or tap the phone over an enabled POS the same way they would a contactless card. This notion obviously jumps the hurdle of integration with the phone, at the cost of the "multiple cards in one virtual wallet" promise."

Remsik said one possible upshot of this might be the proliferation of interchangeable mobile phone "jackets," which would allow consumers to pop in the contactless chip of their choice, regardless of phone model."

Ther is another way, of course ...

"Tools that promise uniformity and compatibility — Java, for instance — definitely have the potential to tackle this problem, but many phones still will not run Java apps."

But, apparently phones get lost easily, which might (or might not) be a problem, depending on the solution.

"The contactless arena as a whole is grappling with the potential security risks of beaming payment information through the ether, even if it is only a few inches. Putting the transmitter inside a phone raises a few extra eyebrows: Remsik points to data which shows that people are three times more likely to lose a cell phone than a wallet."

I would love to see the actual survey with that data.