3. Banks and Mobile Wallets
A third category, and one not necessarily mutually exclusive to categories number one and two above, is the one that involves banks. While a bank card may be integrated at some point into a complete mobile wallet solution, such as the one offered by Google or Apple or your carrier, for now, some banks are forging out on their own with NFC-enabled mobile banking products. We could also consider these “mobile wallet services,” of a sort.
On this front, there are NFC-enabled mobile wallet services under development now from several U.S. banks including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase and U.S. Bank. All four banks have trials underway in major cities using Visa’s In2Pay microSD solution, for example. This solution became commercially available from Visa back in December 2010, but it needs the banks’ involvement to really take off in the consumer space.
Bank of America’s mobile wallet program, which will launch in the second half of this year, recently made the news when the blog BGR spotted an invitation the bank was sending customers to try the BlackBerry microSD solution (a microSD card with NFC capabilities). Visa told us that Bank of America was already testing this solution in major markets including New York, San Francisco and L.A.
The microSD technology Visa uses is provided by a company called DeviceFidelity, which also makes solutions for iPhones and Android devices. The microSD card is inserted into a phone’s memory slot, when possible, to NFC-enable the device. But in the case of the iPhone, a slot is not available. DeviceFidelity works around this issue by using a special, protective case for iPhone users where its microSD functionality is built in.
It should be noted that these sorts of microSD and case solutions are a way to NFC-enable both current and older devices where NFC is not built into the phone itself. In the future, as NFC technology becomes more prevalent, such a solution would not be required.
While they’re more of the dark horse in the race to become complete mobile wallet provider, it’s possible that banks could expand their mobile wallet solutions to include more than just the NFC-enabled credit card replacement technology, but could expand their programs by integrating solutions from third-party providers. But for now, banks are solely focused on replacing just your payment cards (debit, credit and prepaid). For some consumers, that may be enough for now.
In future posts in this series, we’ll look at some of the solutions mentioned above in more detail. Stay tuned.
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