[Macworld]

Post your comments for UK Bank pushes iPhone e-commerce forward here

[dkgemini]

You forgot to mention their outrages charges for using the 'service' £1 per month on top of your mobile phone bill if you want to look up your account balance, and £0.50 every time you want to pay for something. Ridiculous. Especially considering you can just go to say, the concert ticket site you want to buy from, and enter your card details and click and buy. Whatever...

[rdas7]

At first I thought they meant you would be able to purchase things in-store/on-site using iPhone and internet payments, but as the dkgemini points out: why not just navigate to the e-tailer in question and purchase directly from them? What advantage or convenience does MoBank offer for their service charge?

[cv]

They listed the best advantage to using this system: convenience. Your credit card is registered with them already; you just type in a PIN.
It's one-stop shopping. It's exactly why the Apple's iTunes Store is a runaway hit (particularly songs and apps).
Let's pretend that you could install outside apps. Pretend that I find a nice little app at Apple's App Store; it's 99-cents. I visit a developer's website, find the app priced at 79-cents. They want a credit card. Do I trust them? Maybe, maybe not. So I go to my credit card site and generate a single-use card number so I can buy the 79-cent app. I go back to the developer's website and type all this in. Then click "buy".
Note that these guys don't have to figure out if people will like convenience. They already know that looking at systems elsewhere around the world.
Near Field Communication contactless payment systems aren't just concepts. The technology has migrated from smartcards (not widely used here in the United States) to mobile telephones (NTT docomo's Osaifu-Keitai system). That's right, the Japanese wave their cellphones over a sensor to pay for groceries, as a transit pass, to buy event tickets, etc.
Of course, no one is being forced to use NFC contactless payment. Some will pay for its convenience, rather than pull out a wad of cash, a debit card, a credit card, etc. It's opt-in.
At least in Japan, Osaifu-Keitai is also used a loyalty card. Thus, instead of carrying around a stack of cards (Peets, Starbucks, Blockbuster, Safeway, blah blah blah), you just have your phone.

[dkgemini]

I can kind of see the convenience in using it for larger purchases.



But let's pretend I'm at Starbucks, wanting to buy a £2.50 coffee. Instead of reaching into my pocket and picking out a £5 note I now would have to get my iPhone, punch in my pin to unlock it, find the application, open it, browse to the item I want to buy, put in my pin.... And for this 'covenience' I get to pay an extra 50p so my coffee is now £3.00 - an increased price of 20%.

They'll have to do a lot better to get me on board.

[cv]

Actually, you probably wouldn't stand in line. You'd fire up your phone, purchase your drink en route, and walk directly to the pickup line.

But yes, you made your point. You really don't want to be fumbling around with applications on smartphones. That's why the NFC contactless payment system is so damned popular in Japan. You don't need to fumble around with credit cards, cash, member cards, etc. You just wave your phone over a sensor.

This has some work ahead of it, but honestly, the USA is far behind even this. It may be ten years before America are at the point where Japan is today concerning electronic purses.

[soniajane]

Yes, I agree to rdas's comment and why not to purchase directly and ofcourse, we should know about service charge advantage the bank offers.
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