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Siobhan Wagner
The future of money
It’s looking more and more like paper money and coins are becoming redundant. For many carrying cold hard cash on them is far less convenient than slipping a slim bank card in their pocket.
Yet in the future it looks like credit cards might be as rare to see as the queen’s head. According to a new research report, everything from a pint at your local to a bus ticket home will be purchased using a mobile phone.
The new mobile payments will be made possible thanks to a technology called near field communication (NFC) and it could be ready for widespread use across the UK by 2011.
The report called ‘NFC: The Road to Commercial Deployment’ is authored by Sarah Clark, editor of online business site Near Field Communications World.
NFC, which is a wireless communication technology like Bluetooth, could be used to send payments from your bank account. Just by touching two NFC-enabled phones together a user can to transfer money to a friend, buy a drink or pay for a service.
The report also envisions a day when you can meet a new chum and automatically add them as a friend on Facebook by touching your NFC-enabled phones together.
Clark claims the technology can even be configured to open the front door to your house.
It might all sound a little too easy and possibly full of potential for hackers and identify fraudsters, but Clark is adamant the technology is highly secure.
‘Consumers will be able to instantly lock all the mobile wallet services on their phone if it is lost or stolen and then get them automatically transferred onto a new phone as soon as it arrives,’ she said. ‘They will also be able to use their phone to make payments even when the battery is flat.’
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Readers' comments (12)
Anonymous | 15 Jan 2010 1:56 pm
Big brother watches all electronic communications including payments. Cash is one of the last bastions of freedom and encouraging a further shift from cash is madness.
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Anonymous | 15 Jan 2010 2:37 pm
Cash to become obsolete...I wonder.
Take my aged parents, largely housebound.
No internet, mobile etc. Thousands in a bank account they can not access, thousands in unclaimed pension held in a post office miles away. Bills meet with a "if they want the money they will have to come a fetch it" mentallity. For them, cash is still king. Giving them a mobile is just a waste of time.
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Tony Essex | 15 Jan 2010 2:38 pm
What a loathsome idea. I find the prospect of clinking mobile phones together wholly anathema. I don't carry a mobile phone as a rule and I haven't got any friends on Facebook so I guess I'm well and truely stuffed!
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roy williams | 15 Jan 2010 2:41 pm
After suffering in my local from standing behind (mainly young) people paying for their round with a credit card I say if it gets me to the bar quicker then I`m all in favour of this new technology.
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Anonymous | 15 Jan 2010 2:55 pm
Working in the field of bank notes, there is no indication that paper money is on the decline. At the end of the day the Icelandic banks showed us how important cash in the hand is. All of this new technology has to be backed up with real cash. A few whizzers will show off in the pub but they always fall back on cash.
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Andrew Black | 15 Jan 2010 4:18 pm
Over the past decade I have come to trust electronic funds transfer (credit cards, debit cards etc) less and less. I use cash more and more. At least if my wallet of cash is stolen only the cash in the wallet is lost, not the whole contents of my bank account.
I'll stick with cash for as long as I can get my hands on it.
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Simon Martin | 15 Jan 2010 5:54 pm
With the electronic frauds reaching epidemic proportions, and capable of being committed anywhere in the world, does it make sense to lose cash? Working as a Senior Contracts Manager means extensive travelling and flexibility, this means cash!!! try putting a credit card into a cash machine to pay for car parking, or any vending machine.
With fraud on the increase, it would appear that everyone needs cash for certain things, particularly those places that do not take credit cards.
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Anonymous | 16 Jan 2010 1:58 am
Bring it on. If it crashes, gold will save the day as it has done for thousands of years.
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stuart Hodgkinson | 16 Jan 2010 10:26 am
Big brother will fall on it’s own sword. I use the electronic transfers as it’s very convenient and efficient. But big brother is paranoid and shows no respect of personal privacy, real wealth will disappear from big brother and slip through it’s arrogant fingers.
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Matthew Vanderheide | 16 Jan 2010 8:21 pm
NFC is only a link in a long chain of payment technologies and, like every technology, there are flaws.
Even though I prefer the concept of a safe, secure, and electronic currency, the reality is that this future is still out of reach. Plus, cash is tangible, accepted, valued, and only on rare occasions, counterfeit.
Furthermore, this isn't the first time that electronic payments have been tried (i.e. Mondex). The 'electronic currency' concept is fairly sound but tends to fail when it comes to its practical & social applications. In the end, I would bank on cold hard cash being around for a while.
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