Leave the Purse and the Wallet at Home, Just Wave Your Cell Phone

I often think about what it would be like to leave the house with one card; the simplicity that one card would seem to offer. It could hold all my personal data in secure format, I could travel with it, use it to prove I was licensed to drive, even pay my bills with it.

With the advent of the iPhone and similar smartphone devices, we have seen the incorporation of a music player, a media storage device, a GPS, an e-mail client, a phone and other features included in one single device. What has been proposed for some time and what is now closer than ever to being implemented is a smartphone that would also offer payment capabilities. That is, it would serve as a payment card possibly containing a chip or RFID that would allow you to waive your phone past a reader at your local store.

With all the convenience this offers, the bundling of services all containing personal pieces of data presents new opportunities for security enhancements.

There's a delicate balance of spending ease vs. security to ensuring fraud prevention in these new devices. They have encouraged debate on privacy concerns in regards to monitoring spending patterns.

Check out the article below for more info.

Paying with the wave of a cellphone
thegGlobeandMail.com - Thursday, June 25, 2009 05:09AM EDT

It was late March when a crowd of Bay Street types gathered at a luncheon in Toronto to hear a rare public speech by Visa Canada chief executive Tim Wilson.

From behind the podium, Mr. Wilson pulled his wallet out of his pocket and waved it in the air.

"We hope that one day this ... will become this," he said, putting the wallet down and flashing his BlackBerry in his other hand.

That day is closer than most Canadians realize.[...]
Continue to the rest of the Globe and Mail article.

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