I found myself in a marginally stressful situation a few weeks ago. Half way to driving to a meeting on the M3, the fuel indicator came on and I suddenly had one of those "heart drops" moments as I realised that I had left my wallet at home in the pocket of another coat. To make matters worse, a terrible pile up in the other direction made a return impossible.
There is a lot of buzz in the mobile phone industry at the moment around a technology called Near Field Communication (NFC). As far as I understand it, NFC is the next stage for where RFID has been, and will enable mobile phones to be able to be swiped in the same easy that a London Transport Oyster Card can be today. Why is this so exciting? Well, because it allows for mobile phone operators to move into an entirely new market and challenge credit and debit cards as a means of payment in the real world.
It is strange, though, that we are so married to having to have some sort of totem to allow us to make transactions in the physical world. Online through PayPal I am able to make cash transactions without any reference to the bits of plastic that sit in my wallet. Similarly I can access most of my bank account features without recourse to my cards (although if I need to set up a new payee I have to validate it by sticking my debit card into a security reader thingy that I have usually mislaid, so end up doing them over the phone).
Yet sitting in my card, getting increasingly agitated about the decreasing miles remaining in the tank, I had no means of payment available to me above a few pounds in small change and my body (which to be frank is probably worth slightly less these days).
It all, I guess, comes down to issues of trust. For some reason we find it difficult to comprehend that, in a physical environment, it is enough for someone to identify themselves just through their word, and so whether in the form of banknote, card or NFC-enabled smart phone, we need SOMETHING to prove ourselves. It will be interesting to see in our increasingly virtualised world, how long that state will sustain.
(By the way, to round off the story, I had my phone so when I arrived I called a friend who I had remembered worked at the same company that I was visiting. Emma, bless her, lent me a tenner. It was only at the fuel pump later did I truly appreciate how little petrol ten pounds buys you these days…)
mmitII 