Belgians Will Soon Pay Bills With Cell Phones

March 22, 2007 – 9:42 am

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The futuristic idea of paying your bills using your mobile phone are not so futuristic, after all. In fact, this option will soon become reality for millions of people in Belgium. This will essentially make their cell phones a debit card.

Using text messaging, the payment system will allow consumers to pay anything from six euros up to the limit of their bank account, Banksys Chief Executive Vincent Roland told a news conference.

Consumers will pay 0.25 euros ($0.33) per transaction and sellers 0.49 euros.

In most countries, banks and mobile operators are still testing different technologies to introduce cell phone payment systems. The text message-based system used in Belgium has relatively large communications cost which makes it unsuitable for small transactions.

The main problem to overcome for the operators will be educating, which will be delivered via marketing. Right now consumers will not know about the service or trust it. It will be very interesting to see how the adoption rate is for the technology. I’m sure there will be other announcements of more of these trials in coming months. This type of convenience could change how people pay their bills.

Would you use your phone as a debit card?

Resource: Reuters

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