Citizens of most foreign countries have had the ability to pay and get paid by cellphone for the last 2 to 4 years now. Total online banking through their cellphones. No internet needed. Even most countries in Africa have enjoyed this convenience for the last couple of years. Their employers pay them by cellphone and they can spend the money by cellphone, pay debts or send money to friends or family by cellphone. Now that service has been brought to the U.S. and anyone can now get paid or spend money by cellphone. Go to a garage sale and you don't have enough cash in pocket to pay for your purchase? No problem. Pay by cellphone. Soon stores will be having that capability as well. You also get a regular debit card with your account which is tied to your bank account or a credit card so you can spend your funds in stores that don't have that service yet or use it in an ATM machine. Better yet, there are no per-transaction or sign up fees. Paypal which is extremely popular on the net these days costs big bucks so this service ought to just about put paypal out of business. This service also has higher daily spending limits than paypal does too. Don't cost anything to sign up for it either. In time stores will be set up so that all you have to do is point your cellphone at a store or ATM terminal and punch a couple of keys and your transaction will be complete. Terminals and cellphones will communicate with each other either through bluetooth or infrared or maybe RFID. Who knows how it will be done at this point in time but the technology is easily there to do it today.
I would definitely NOT trust such a system. Too many possibilities for ID theft and other personal information problems. While banks often herald their security measures, there are more people out there who are much smarter in electronics than those security folks at these banks. If it can be ****ed with it will.
You will trust it sooner or later. Trust me on that. When the time comes that you go to Wal-Mart or wherever and everybody going through the checkouts don't reach for their wallets any more but rather just point their cellphones at the terminal and push a key on their cellphone, pick up their merchandise and go, so will you. For now, I understand your concerns very well.
Citibank is introducing cellphone banking I just found out that the new cellphone banking operation I spoke of above is being introduced by citibank who is obviously going after Paypal with all guns blazing. Paypal started out as a subsidiary of a bank known as xcom.com which went bankrupt in 2000. Paypal survived but xcom did not. The reason xcom went belly up was because they offered almost unlimited overdraft protection to most of it's customers and didn't have the funds to back it up. They went out suddenly and with no advance warning. When they shut down they sold all their accounts to a collection agency for .02 on the dollar with no guarantee of collectability and no accounting records whatever. The debt collector pursued people for many years and made a killing on the profits from that deal. Those who demanded validation and followed up on it ended up owing nothing at all since the debt collector couldn't prove a thing. Couldn't even provide the account numbers from the bank and had to assign their own account numbers. Once it is widely known that Citibank is behind this idea of cellphone banking it will be far more widely accepted and used than Paypal is and all the other banks will soon follow suit with their own cellphone banking options. The time has long since came for this system to be put in place by all banks and Citibank is obviously the leader in this new system
