contactless mobile payments Japan

[Dave Birch] Back from eastern Europe, I was speaking at the FT Mobile conference in London today, so I’ve been thinking about mobile phones again, except when the guy from Naked News was talking. Actually, he did make me think: he said “content is king”, despite the fact that it transparently isn’t. Every delegate at the conference had a handout from the FT showing that the income of the top 10 telecommunications companies in the world was over half a trillion dollars last year. DoCoMo alone earned nearly £53 billion.

DoCoMo are fascinating. European digital money fanboys (eg, me) are fixated on DoCoMo’s experiments with the obviously storming overlap between mobile and contactless technologies. Now that one of Japan’s biggest retail groups (Aeon) has thrown its weight behind DoCoMo. Convenience store chain operator Family Mart Co. plans to add contactless payment to its stores within the next year, and Sumitomo Mitsui Card will add contactless compatibility to the credit card terminals it has in retailers in Japan. Am/pm Japan (a convenience store like 7-Eleven) also said that it will begin accepting contactless payments in all 1,350 of its convenience stores across Japan by the end of this year. Phew!

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