The vPhone: Why Visa Should Go Mobile
The vPhone: Why Visa Should Go Mobile Author: Eric Everson, Founder MyMobiSafe.com
With all of the success of Apple’s iPhone, there is a growing case to support a company like Visa entering the mobile industry too. With the emergence of mobile banking and the success of niche targeting phones, there is potentially a bright future for Visa in this industry.
As the founder of MyMobiSafe.com, mobile banking has become an area of interest for a number of reasons. First and foremost, is the reason that seemingly everything we do as consumer nations requires money. Once we trust our phones enough to carry out routine financial transactions (which many users are already beginning to adopt) the role of mobile finance is infinite in possibility. If Visa were to introduce a phone, it should, like the iPhone focus on a niche user group.
Those late teens to thirty-something’s that make up the early adopter footprint are the ones that are already using mobile banking. The Visa “vPhone” should focus on consolidating all of the things that can be done into a single handset. As many vendors are beginning to adopt the tap and go payment solutions, this should be built into the vPhone. Let me do my shopping and then tap my phone and enter my PIN and be done with it. If I want to login to my handset to check my Visa balance or current transaction history I should be able to. If I want to get a cash advance so I can carry some cash around, let me use the tap and go system.
As one stops to consider it, the very notion of mobility is limited by the fact that there is not a phone already designed to cater towards our mobile lifestyles. For male users the vPhone carries the innovative potential for allowing us to quit carrying our wallets at all. There are many people that have already started tucking their credit card into their cell phone case to alleviate the hassle of a wallet, so it would be nice to have a phone that incorporated it.
What about the security issues one may ask? What if my phone gets stolen or lost? There are already a number of platforms available that could be used to disable or lock the phone. Additionally as all cell phones have GPS capability now anyway, who is the idiot thief that would even consider taking such a phone? That would be the equivalent of inviting the police to your hideout. There are many security features that could be integrated into the vPhone that would not only ensure that it is the safest phone around, but that it is capable of taking mobile finance to the next level.
Anyone else want a Visa phone? Me too!
Cheers, MobileTech
Your mobile security guru… Eric Everson, Founder MyMobiSafe.com