computerworld.com — Imagine waving your New York subway pass in front of the cash register at 7-Eleven to buy a sandwich. Or sending a text message to pay for items you found surfing the Web on your cell phone. Such payment methods are considered futuristic in the U.S. but are now a reality in Asia and Europe.
Aug 26, 2006 View in Crawl 4
absentmindedjwcAug 27, 2006
"Imagine waving your New York subway pass in front of the cash register at 7-Eleven"referring to JR's Suica card if I guess right... the only problem with that statement is that JR is a railway company... has nothing to do with banks... and you can only use the Suica card with places that accept it, which is usually shops inside of the JR station...
garyh84Aug 27, 2006
The subways in the US are government owned/funded, I'm sure it's that way in other countries as well. But if the money you put on the card essentually goes directly to the government, then how is the 7-11 suppose to get the money?
Closed AccountAug 27, 2006
In Europe I could transfer money from accounts in any bank to any account in any other bank, through online banking. Here in the US if I mention it they think THAT's futuristic!!In the US there's no standard for transfering money and identifying accounts. I have to GO to the bank wait in the line to make a wire transfer. It's ridiculous.
Closed AccountAug 27, 2006
Random observations semi-related to this topic.At least in Finland it is quite easy to enable cell phone payments for items priced 1-20 dollars. I was considering this for a web store, but the phone companies tend to take a too large of a chunk of that money / charge high installation costs to make it practical for anything else than very high margin impulse purchases (ring-tones etc.).In Japan I used the Suica card to make purchases in JR's stations, and it was quite convenient. It doesn't work outside the stations, but you make purchases inside the stations every day so it ends up being useful. I think some (many?) train/metro lines are actually owned by companies because it allows them to force customers through their stores as they commute.I was surprised when visiting New York that not all places accept credit card. I tried several times to make purchases with my VISA at smaller stores, and it was easy to tell that more Finnish stores accept VISA than American companies do. Wire transfers are very simple inside Finland. You don't need to care if it's between different banks or not, all you need to input is one account number, the sum and name of recipient (although it doesn't seem to matter if the name is a bit wrong) to whom you want to transfer. You can also transfer to any other EU country for no extra cost, but some extra info is needed (SWIFT codes or something). All transfers to any country can be made using web bank.In Japan transferring was a bit more complex, you needed the name of the bank, the name or number of the branch of that bank, the account number inside that branch, name of the recipient and the sum. Transfers can be made from web bank, but I'm not sure if foreign transfers are possible from the web.Anyone know how advanced South Korea is in these things?
picaroAug 27, 2006
I hope bank transfers become that easy in the U.S. Paypal needs to die.
qoogirlAug 27, 2006
@ expresso:Good comment. It was very informative.@ picaro:Paypal is kind of dated, isn't it?