I recently saw an article about using mobile payments to pay for parking in New York. (Read here). This is of course not new and has been effectively deployed in many countries (particularly in Eastern Europe). This is one of the coolest and most logical applications for mobile payments. It is of course important to redesign the whole business process - to change it from a proximity payment to a location-independent payment. But the biggest problem (of course), is to build a workable business case for it. The revenue from parking revenue and the investment required to make it work, just does not do it.For mobile payments to become ubiquitous, it is important that multiple business applications be deployed at the same time, based on the same payment infrastructure. The combined business cases now add up into a viable investment case. It is important to approach mobile payment applications in such a way, as it would otherwise never be realised.
