DoCoMo Seeks To Increase Wallet Phone Use In Japan

Although NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile-network operator, has put 28 million contactless wallet phones into the pockets of subscribers, only about one in five tap the phones daily to make payments or use other services, according to CardLine Global sister publication Cards&Payments. "Actual usage is not so high," Haruhiko Nomura, executive director of DoCoMo's Multimedia Services Department, tells CardLine sister publication Cards&Payments. "I don't know why, even when it's preloaded [with] the applications." Nomura outlined the challenges DoCoMo and its competing mobile telcos face in getting more consumers to use the phones. Among the biggest obstacles are worries among subscribers about the safety of putting their contactless credit and prepaid payment accounts onto the phones along with their monthly transit passes, Nomura said earlier this month at SourceMedia's CTST conference in Orlando, Fla. More fundamentally, it is difficult to introduce a technology, he said. "The mobile-wallet service is a new experience to everybody," said Nomura. "It takes [a] long time to persuade the end customers." DoCoMo and other wallet-phone backers must convince more merchants to accept payment or other services loaded on the phones and convince more service providers to put their applications on the devices. "We need to show them the actual benefit. Otherwise, they will move to the [other] new technologies," he said. But DoCoMo, which launched the wallet phones in 2004 and continues to lead the national rollout, sees progress. As of the end of March, merchants had installed 608,000 terminals that can accept payment from the phones, Nomura said. That includes vending machines and shops that take DoCoMo's own contactless credit brand, iD.