Phone alone

[Dave Birch] Well, it finally happened. After sitting through literally innumerable conference presentations where someone from a telco refers to some spurious statistic about the typical person being more likely to forget their wallet than their phone, I forgot my wallet AGAIN. Perhaps this is an age related disorder. I filled the car up with petrol and when I wandered in to pay I realised that I’d left my wallet at home. Aargh! I did have my phone, but sadly the UK is one of those backward countries where you can’t use your phone at point-of-sale.

Technorati Tags: identity, mobile, payments

As it happens, it didn’t really matter. I filled out a form — this being modern Britain, me and the car (and more particularly its registration) had already been captured on CCTV — so I just had to sign a form to promise to pay and then I drove home and got my credit cards. As a testament to the inherent goodness of mankind (at least in Weybridge), I was looking so embarrassed that the guy behind me even offered to pay for me: he saw I had some business cards that I’d taken out of my pocket while searching for money and said that if I gave him a card then I could just post him a cheque.

This incident has had me thinking since the weekend, because it links identity, authentication and payment in such interesting ways. We were just talking about this in another context over on the Digital Identity blog.

These opinions are my own (I think) and are presented solely in my capacity as an interested member of the general public [posted with ecto]