In the future will our cell phones be our credit cards?

The New York Times recently featured an article asking us to imagine “a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader”.

That’s not a new idea. It’s been around for a while. In fact, a while ago, the idea of using an iPhone as a credit card emerged out of a real world situation.

The benefits are obvious: why carry around lots of things when you could just carry around one thing – your cell phone?

But, the New York Times argues that there are too many separate entities with competing interests involved in the process required to turn cell phones into credit cards. Until there is a unified and concerted effort to make this happen, chances are we could be in the same position ten years from now. It’s going to take a leader. A pioneer.

Our bet is that if anyone does it, it will either be Apple or Google. Two companies that know how to make things happen.