Has Skinny (or Vodafone, Telecom or 2 degrees) thought of allowing prepay customers the ability to pay for more services than calls, texts and data using their mobile's prepay balance? In a similar way that www.txtpay.co.nz and www.snapper.co.nz do but not from their credit card but from their prepay balance. Thus customers could use their mobiles to text payments from their prepay balances for a variety of goods and services.
Yes you're right, some carparking and donations to some charities but imagine if it was more than that. Say telecos started off small allowing their customers to pay for movie tickets by texting the $ amount from their prepay balance to the cinema. The cinema, the teleco and the customer all win. Gradually ones mobile account could be used to purchase alot more goods and services. Can you see any disadvantages?
Rommel: Gradually ones mobile account could be used to purchase alot more goods and services. Can you see any disadvantages?
The banks get rather grumpy and start make interconnecting business accounts to this new "phone money" difficult,
Also customers wonder why they have to arrange to top up their phone accounts to spend money at ( for example) a cinema, when the plastic EFTPOS card they have already allows them to do it,
For mobile or small payments there may be an advantage to using txt codes on your phone, but in terms of "mobile wallets" well that's what NFC is for isn't it?
wellygary: For mobile or small payments there may be an advantage to using txt codes on your phone, but in terms of "mobile wallets" well that's what NFC is for isn't it?
I found the solution they developed for paying for parking by text was just a major pain to use. NFC would be far better.
Even better than NFC though is something I already carry called a paywave card.
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