Monitise announced today that they patented the a way for consumers to set up a single account and generate single-use card information on a mobile phone. This has huge meaning for those of us who are sick of the separation between the virtual wallets and the mobile wallets. I see this as a smaller step toward a fully mobile/virtual wallet because it seems to be an intermediary step- they're not trying to force a new method of payment that requires a dongle, activating a chip, gluing a sticker on your phone. They're not even doing anything particularly exciting! At the end of the day, you're still going to show up in the POS as a card- because that's exactly what you're doing- producing a card number on demand.
But maybe that's where the genius is- by getting customers to accept an intermediary step instead of a giant leap forward through QR or Bluetooth or NFC, they're just asking you to open up your mind to using your card a little differently.
I'll be interested to see how adoption ticks up for this one, my bet is it's going to be farmed out for multiple companies to use, and I bet it'll have a much larger impact, much faster, than other methods.
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