Coming Soon - Star Wars Stuff

These days, a good place to gaze into the crystal ball and foretell the future of the payment process is a consumer electronics show. The image you see may still be a bit cloudy, but the concepts being discussed are likely to take place in some form.

For example, at a recent show in Las Vegas, Visa International and Royal Philips Electronics proposed a number of demos and concepts. The two companies announced an alliance last spring to work together to make some of these products a reality. Here's a few of their ideas:
Music lovers could download the right to listen to a song to their PDAs or Visa cards by holding a PDA next to a rock star's poster or a radio-frequency enabled, contactless Visa near a store kiosk selling songs. The smart poster would have an embedded microchip that sends rights to the PDA. The kiosk would have the technology to capture payment information from the card and to transfer rights to the card. In both cases, the user could transfer the rights to a Philips-technology developed Internet radio to hear the songs.

Concert or theater patrons can use their mobile phones to pay for tickets at the box office simply by holding the phones next to a payment terminal. A contactless chip in the phone transfers Visa payment data to the terminal, which confirms payment and sends the tickets back to the phone. A phone user can then transfer a ticket to a friend's mobile phone if desired. At the concert or show, both ticket holders can use their phones to gain entry to the event.

Travelers can use their home PCs, a special mouse and a contactless Visa payment card to buy airline tickets and make hotel reservations. The tickets can then be transferred from the PC to the contactless card and used for airline check in, boarding passes and check-in at the hotel. The hotel room "key" could then be transferred to the traveler's mobile phone to be used to access the room.

Copyright © 2004 Bankers' Hotline. Originally appeared in Bankers' Hotline, Vol. 14, No. 2, 5/05