Payment through mobile phones should become available in the next few years as most companies are discovering how beneficial it would be to include such a payment system. We’re starting to use our mobile phones for virtually anything. If several years ago we’d only use them to voice call, now we’re texting, e-mailing, surfing the web, listening to music and snapping pictures with our handsets. From this point of view, the vast majority of users would be very content to hear that they can ditch their credit cards in favor of their mobile phones (that they already carry around on a daily basis anyway).
Apple seems to be interested in mobile payment as well. According to NearfieldCommunications World the Cupertino-based company has recently hired an expert in near field communication technology as its new product manager for mobile commerce. The new employee, named Banjamin Vigier, has been working on near field communication technology since 2004 and was in charge of NFC activities at French mobile network operator Bouygues Telecom as well as flash memory manufacturer Sandisk. After that Vigier became product manager for mobile wallet payment and NFC at mFoundry, an US mobile payments company. During his employment there, Vigier conceived and managed the PayPal Mobile service as well as Starbucks’ barcode-based mobile payments service.
For those who were wondering what Near Field Communications is all about, it’s a short range wireless communication technology that’s used in mobile phones for a wide variety of applications among which mobile payments, ticketing or interactive advertising. Apple has on previous occasions published several patent applications which in some way relate to NFC technology and is also rumored to have prototype devices outfitted with radio-frequency identification chips.
The NFC-related Apple patents, published over the last few months include:
- A NFC-based mobile payments service that allows consumers to pay merchants or other consumers through a credit or debit card directly from their bank account or through credit stored in their iTunes account;
- The iPay, iBuy and iCoupons patents which describe a comprehensive mobile payments, commerce and marketing business bassed around a NFC-enabled iPhone;
- An airline ticketing and boarding pass application which describes an automated airport ticketing and baggage counter kiosk which might allow users of the iTravel application to process themselves through the security clearance system and check in at the boarding gate;
- A nearfield communications enabled iPod, game controller, TV and iPhone.
So Apple seems to be quite interested in mobile payment, which will possibly become the standard in some countries. Mobile payment has taken its first steps into being adopted in the 
US. The only reason why it’s not widely adopted is that consumers are somewhat worried of switching to mobile payment, fearing that most merchants won’t support it, whereas merchants are waiting for more users to adopt it in order to implement it (since they would need to invest into the necessary equipment). Vigier declined to reveal any information regarding what he’ll be working on at Apple. Still, it shouldn’t be long until Apple attempts to implement mobile payment on the iPhone. The phone has been selling like hotcakes worldwide. We also know that Apple is perfectly capable of introducing and properly promoting new technology of any kind. They pulled this off with several of their products so far and they would be the most appropriate for introducing and turning mobile payments into a popular service. While the info regarding Vigier being hired at Apple is quite recent, according to LinkedIn, he’s been at Apple since July this year.
