Cash of the Future? Your Cell Phone

Mobile phones are becoming an increasingly popular way to make all sorts of payments. In America fans of the Atlanta Hawks have been testing specially adapted Nokia handsets linked to their Visa cards to enter their local stadium and to buy refreshments. Elsewhere schemes are more advanced. You can already pass the day in Austria without carrying cash, credit or debit cards by paying for everything, including consumer goods, with a mobile phone. Worldwide payments using mobile phones will climb from just $3.2 billion in 2003 to more than $37 billion by 2008.

Mobiles are used to buy lots of things in Asia. Earlier this month Visa and SK Telecom, South Korea's leading mobile company, announced the commercial launch of a phone-payments system aimed initially at 30,000 subscribers. In Japan hundreds of thousands of transactions, from buying railway tickets to picking up groceries, already take place every day with customers passing their handsets across a device like that pictured above. Payments are confirmed with a sound like the bell of an old cash register.

From the current issue of The Economist, "A Cash Call: Mobile phones are quickly emerging as ways to pay with electronic cash."