# Docomo phones will become your wallet

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2003-11-28T13:44:14Z


Sony and Docomo have announced that they are working together to put contactless IC chips in phones. Sony's FeliCa (type C contactless IC chip) is slowly becoming a defacto standard in Japan. (The government is backing a different standard, type B.) Currently the Japan Railways, AM/PM and others are using it for payments. Many companies use it for company ID's. The problem is that you can't see how much is left in your card and it's a pain to "charge" the card with more money. Putting it on a phone lets you download money from your bank and see how much is left. I worry about the privacy and security issues, but connecting an RF payment system with a phone totally makes sense.

I have a theory that Docomo has to become an identity/payment company and dump the voice and other bit-pushing businesses and go flat rate or free on the network. Docomo should buy a credit card company and use the bit-pushing business as a stick when collecting money. There are some regulations regarding payment businesses that make it difficult, but I'm sure the government would waive this if there was enough of a social need. Right now, the transaction business that credit card companies do doesn't make money. This has driven credit card companies to become loan companies that lobby the government to allow them to charge crazy interest rates. These interest rates cause people to end up in debt hell and commit suicide. If Docomo replaced credit cards as the primary non-cash transaction, credit system and could use network service termination to lower the collection costs, I bet they could make enough money on the transaction business to cover the bit-pushing.

Docomo is Japan's biggest mobile carrier that does about $8B / yr in data revenues.





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Network Technology, Wireless and Mobile