If you live in America, chances are that it’s been a while since you’ve actually touched cash. These days people opt to pay for everything with plastic, and we’re not just talking credit cards, but debit cards too since they provide the added benefit of enabling online banking to check how much money you’ve been spending every week, and they also take up less space in your wallet. In Italy things are the exact opposite, with over 90% of all transactions done via slips of paper and metal coins. Italy’s 5 major operators (Telecom Italia, Vodafone, Wind, 3, PosteMobile, and Fastweb) are looking to change that and on Monday they introduced a payment platform that will enable over 46 million Italians to purchase digital goods and services using nothing more than their mobile phone. Here’s how it works: See something on the internet that you really want to watch or listen to? Click a button and you get a notification on your phone with a passcode. Enter said code in the appropriate text field and boom, you’re done.
Wether or not this takes off remains to be seen. Piracy is rampant, and making the purchase of digital goods easier isn’t going to do anything to curb that. Instead the business models have to change to make people willing to pay for that new single or music video or whatever. Then there’s the whole NFC thing. Visa wants to get everyone to use their payment network to purchase not only digital goods, but physical items as well. Once Visa shows the Italians how awesome it is to be able to pay for things using just a tap of their phone, how long do you think it’ll be until all new laptops become NFC enabled and USB NFC dongles are given away with each new smartphone purchase? Give it a few years.
[Via: Mobile Business Briefing]