Well, when I used to live in South Korea about 3 years back, it was common to see someone transferring $100,000 on their cellphone of pay for goods, just like a credit card.
I am sure that technology has evolved even further, while us consumers in the U.S. are still using plastic cards.
Most of this has to do with big corporations in America who won’t let this happen:
The short answer is “red tape.” There are simply far too many entities, players, middlemen and suits that each want a piece of the pie to make such a system practical in the U.S., for now. Indeed, popular and proven programs already exist in some major cities, like Atlanta, New York and San Francisco, but the effect has yet to grow into anything we could seriously call “critical mass.
This is another reason why broadband internet is still about 10 times slower than Asia. The telecommunication companies make way too much more money selling consumers outdated technology.
Even the iPhone isn’t really revolutionary from Asian perspective, they are already playing with live TV on radio frequencies, not the internet on their smartphones.
Of course, there are downfalls to cellphone credit card technology too such as fraud detection and security.
But glad to say, if you go to any Korean bank websites, your computer has to download encryption and anti-virus software before you can even access the website itself. (Of course, this is all done in IE, WHY!?!)
Corporate America has to start embracing technology instead of just trying to fool consumers and making them cash cows. Otherwise, in year 2015, we will still be far far behind everyone who’s been using this technology.
