Canadian mobile commerce companies may experience record number of payments made over smartphones.
As the news is released that the initial launch of the first smartphone payments for mobile commerce could be in as little as six months, thousands of retailers in Canada have already integrated the necessary equipment to make it possible for consumers to use those devices to pay for their purchases.
This has made the country a leader in the development of a mobile payment system, causing many to start speculating if it could make cash obsolete in the future.
At the moment, the only step that is left is the final agreement among the telecom and credit card companies, and the banks. It looks as though this partnership isn’t long off, and that it will revolutionize the options available that Canadians have to pay for the goods and services they purchase every day.
Of course, this leap forward in Canadian mobile commerce is dependent on consumer adoption.
Should consumers actually choose to embrace this technology – and it is far from known whether or not they will – then they will gain access to a wide variety of different services, ranging from payments to discount coupons, membership cards, loyalty programs, transit passes, or even official identification such as drivers’ licenses.
Canadians won’t be the first to benefit from this type of mobile commerce project. Companies and banks in Japan, the U.K., and South Korea, among others, have also established smartphone payment systems. What Canada is hoping is that they will achieve much broader adoption than these other countries were able to achieve.
For example, South Koreans have been using phone-based public transit cards for many years, with off-and-on popularity, and a number of stores have now made it possible for transactions to be processed using mobile devices. However, they have yet to take off and live up to the hype that has surrounded them.
Japanese consumers appear to be satisfied with the service they are receiving with their plastic credit and debit cards and in the United Kingdom, regulators from the European Union are still looking into whether or not their competition rules are being violated when telecom operators work together to establish a payments system for mobile commerce.
