How Smartphones, Netbooks Will Change The Future of Money

• Posted: Friday, April 03, 2009
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: Netbook, Smartphone

By Natasha Lomas

Companies have been developing mobile banking and e-payments options for a number of years, but the future is looking more complicated as higher bandwidth and more sophisticated devices such as netbooks and smartphones narrow the divide between fixed and mobile internet access.

Mobile banking and m-payments are on the increase and look set to become substantial markets - analyst house Juniper Research recently predicted 150 million people will be using mobile banking services globally by 2011.

Much of the hype around m-payments has so far centred on NFC-enabled 'wallet phones'. Earlier this month for example, mobile operator Orange and credit card company Barclaycard announced a strategic partnership to develop m-payments technology including mobile wallet handsets - which use near field communications (NFC) to make contactless payments.

But a wealth of other mobile payment options exist - and the smartphone-fuelled rise of full access to the mobile internet is increasingly blurring the boundaries between internet and mobile payments.

Gareth Lodge, regional research director for European payments at analyst house TowerGroup, told silicon.com: "There are hundreds of different [payment] solutions out there - both on the internet and on the mobile, so the challenge for the mobile operators is also working out which bet to place on which [payment] operators."

According to the analyst, payments markets are pretty incestuous already: "At the moment I can make a virtual credit card payment on my virtual PayPal credit card on my BlackBerry on a website - at the end of the day is that an e-payment, a mobile payment, a credit card payment?

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