Sick of Chip and Pin or signing a check? Want your payment to be even faster? Enter Orange! In December 2010 Orange announced its commitment to NFC, or near field communications. Essentially what will happen is that your Orange mobile will be turned into a payment device that will allow you to pay for things simply by swiping your phone across a payment reader.
Fear not if you're worried about this brave new world of contactless payments - the technology is tried and tested in transport systems and ski lifts the world over - including Oyster cards on the London Underground.
Orange are trialling their new NFC system in France, rolling out NFC enabled sim cards to new Orange customers across France in 2011.
How will it work?
You'll need an NFC-compatible phone, like the Google Nexus S, to work in conjunction with the NFC sim card. You will then be able to wave your mobile phone in front of a payment reader, and voila! Your phone is now a wallet! Orange have announced their intention to initially use NFC enabled mobiles to verify transport, ticketing and rewards. It's likely that this would be expanded more widely, to incorporate card payments themselves (much like on the current Barclaycard OnePulse where you "wave and go" to pay for items).
Some problems and their possible solutions
There is the security implication to consider. If you mobile is directly connected to your bank account, that's even more incentive for the less-than-savoury types to take an opportunity to pinch your mobile. Not good news. Although some phones have the capability to be wiped remotely, it is far from common practice. At last count you can do so with the iPhone and the Desire HD, so unless you are the lucky owner of one of these premium handsets, you'll be left with the urgent need to freeze your bank account!
At present it is also unclear how NFC in mobiles would work in practical operation. Would you need your phone to be switched on in order to swipe in at a London Tube station? If so, could the limited battery life of our ever-smarter smartphones become an issue? And what if your phone conked out halfway through a journey? Well, it seems unlikely - NFC devices currently in use don't require a power supply, so it would be an oversight if this turned out to be the case!
The other thing you may be concerned about is the prospect of unintentional payments. Nothing would be more unacceptable and downright irritating than walking through a shopping mall only to discover that a vendor you walked past as inadvertently charged a payment meant so someone else to you. It sounds like a nightmare but, luckily, extremely unlikely to happen. The communications field that transfers payment information is extremely small, hence "near" field communication. You'd have to want to pay using your phone to find that you have!
Of course, the dream of being able to swipe your mobile in front of each payment machine as you zip your way from the shop to the bus to the cinema and back, is actually a fair way off. Although the technology is already in successful operation in some channels, it is likely to be a while before there is anywhere near enough demand for a widespread, integrated system. And undoubtedly the people at Orange have all put their heads together to ensure that security and technical threats are eliminated before this technology becomes part of your day to day life!
Once it does, I am sure that NFC will have the biggest impact on payments since we switched from cash to card!
Fear not if you're worried about this brave new world of contactless payments - the technology is tried and tested in transport systems and ski lifts the world over - including Oyster cards on the London Underground.
Orange are trialling their new NFC system in France, rolling out NFC enabled sim cards to new Orange customers across France in 2011.
How will it work?
You'll need an NFC-compatible phone, like the Google Nexus S, to work in conjunction with the NFC sim card. You will then be able to wave your mobile phone in front of a payment reader, and voila! Your phone is now a wallet! Orange have announced their intention to initially use NFC enabled mobiles to verify transport, ticketing and rewards. It's likely that this would be expanded more widely, to incorporate card payments themselves (much like on the current Barclaycard OnePulse where you "wave and go" to pay for items).
Some problems and their possible solutions
There is the security implication to consider. If you mobile is directly connected to your bank account, that's even more incentive for the less-than-savoury types to take an opportunity to pinch your mobile. Not good news. Although some phones have the capability to be wiped remotely, it is far from common practice. At last count you can do so with the iPhone and the Desire HD, so unless you are the lucky owner of one of these premium handsets, you'll be left with the urgent need to freeze your bank account!
At present it is also unclear how NFC in mobiles would work in practical operation. Would you need your phone to be switched on in order to swipe in at a London Tube station? If so, could the limited battery life of our ever-smarter smartphones become an issue? And what if your phone conked out halfway through a journey? Well, it seems unlikely - NFC devices currently in use don't require a power supply, so it would be an oversight if this turned out to be the case!
The other thing you may be concerned about is the prospect of unintentional payments. Nothing would be more unacceptable and downright irritating than walking through a shopping mall only to discover that a vendor you walked past as inadvertently charged a payment meant so someone else to you. It sounds like a nightmare but, luckily, extremely unlikely to happen. The communications field that transfers payment information is extremely small, hence "near" field communication. You'd have to want to pay using your phone to find that you have!
Of course, the dream of being able to swipe your mobile in front of each payment machine as you zip your way from the shop to the bus to the cinema and back, is actually a fair way off. Although the technology is already in successful operation in some channels, it is likely to be a while before there is anywhere near enough demand for a widespread, integrated system. And undoubtedly the people at Orange have all put their heads together to ensure that security and technical threats are eliminated before this technology becomes part of your day to day life!
Once it does, I am sure that NFC will have the biggest impact on payments since we switched from cash to card!
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