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Mobile phones are more useful for providing details about payments than for initiating them at the point of sale, according to Visa Inc.
Numerous banks and card companies, including Visa, have tested mobile phones with contactless payment capabilities, but Elizabeth Buse, the San Francisco company's global head of product, said her company does not see phones replacing cards for in-person purchases.
In the United States, mobile banking "will be mostly a value-added channel to provide information about a payment instead of replacing the payment itself," she said during the keynote address Monday at the ATM, Debit & Prepaid Forum in Phoenix.
Visa announced last month that it would test a mobile phone person-to-person transfer service this year with U.S. Bancorp and other financial companies, and that it is working with Google Inc. to offer financial capabilities through the Android operating system that the technology company expects to introduce for mobile phones this month.
Ms. Buse said that Visa is working on three applications for Android phones.
One will offer alerts, another will let consumers sign up for merchant offers, and the third will help users locate automated teller machines and merchants where they can use these offers.
According to the CTIA-The Wireless Association, a nonprofit organization that represents wireless communications companies, the United States had 262,720,165 wireless subscribers at the end of June. Several speakers at the conference said this means an enormous potential market exists for mobile financial services. The conference was sponsored by SourceMedia, which publishes American Banker.
Mobile banking and payments services will vary by nation, Ms. Buse said, depending an how advanced a country's payments system is.
In countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia, replacing infrastructure will take time, she said, and mobile banking will probably be a value-added, informational service.
In countries like Japan, where electronics payments are available but less common, mobile phones can complement cards at the point of sale.
And in less developed countries, such as Senegal, where 4 million people have mobile phones but many are unbanked, mobile payments could become more widely accepted than cards or other forms of electronic payment, Ms. Buse said.
In the United States, getting payments applications onto consumers' mobile phones faces numerous challenges, notably because most of the major wireless communications carriers operate on different, closed software systems, Jeff McLaughlin, executive vice president of mobile strategies for Monitise Americas, said in a mobile financial services workshop on Sunday.
Though text messages can be sent to virtually all phones, the text message system is not secure enough for mobile payments, he said.
But the arrival of the Android phone this month may help change all of that because it runs on an open system for which anyone can design applications.
"Once those phones start spreading across carriers, it will be interesting to see what happens," Mr. McLaughlin said.
