Pay for the Bus With a Phone: Mobile Wallet System Coming to China Mobile

June 14, 2013 Leave a comment

Pay for the Bus With a Phone: Mobile Wallet System Coming to China Mobile

June 14, 2013

by C. Custer

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Taking the bus in China isn’t that difficult if you have a transit card you can swipe to pay your fare. But soon, even the transit card may be unnecessary. The Beijing News reported yesterday that China Mobile has partnered with a number of banks (eight so far) and with China UnionPay to create a mobile payment system, and the first part of that system is coming very soon.

Right now, Beijing China Mobile customers who’d like to can visit any of six designated China Mobile shops to switch their SIM cards out for new ones that will allow them to connect their phones to their bank accounts. Soon, Beijing’s public transportation system will let them swipe those phones to pay for bus fares around the city. No transit cards required.But of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg; China Mobile and the banks have big plans for the virtual wallets (which use NFC technology) and are already working with NFC-enabled handsets like Samsung’s Galaxy S4, the HTC One, and some Huawei and ZTE models to integrate the system. By September, China Mobile says there will be twenty handset models that fully support the virtual wallet system.

In Beijing, a few upscale spots like Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs already support mobile payment, but as China Mobile’s system proliferates — assuming it catches on with users, which it might not — expect that number to jump up quite a bit. Has the era of waving your phone at everything dawned in China? We’ll have to wait and see.

(Incidentally, between this and its next-gen 4G network potentially coming online, this is looking to be an impressive second half of the year for China Mobile!)

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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