I’m still waiting for to become
Behren, one of the lead engineers at Braintree, a payment services company that powers and processes transactions for popular services including Uber, the mobile taxi service, and Airbnb, the travel rental site. This reluctance leads to an infinite waiting period and slows the growth of an industry, he said.
Von Behren was one of the creators of Google Wallet before he left to work at Square and later at Braintree. He said that while his Google team’s original goal was to simplify online purchases, it quickly realised that nudging mobile e-commerce forward seemed more urgent. A large portion of shopping begins on mobile phones, but getting to the final checkout remains a challenge because entering payment information on a small screen is clumsy. And most traditional big-box retailers that could build infrastructure to support mobile payments came of age in an era where there wasn’t network connectivity, making it harder to update their cashier software, payment methods or loyalty programmes, von Behren said.
He ultimately decided that working with legacy retailers to create a system for in-store shopping with phones was a tremendous juggling act. It kind of worked and it kind of didn’t. But a new generation of innovation is coming, he said, so he thinks that wide use of payby-phone systems will arrive eventually.
I guess I’ll have to wait and see. For now, I’ve come up with my own workaround for hot weather: securing my credit card and driver’s license to my iPhone with a rubber band. But it’s not what I had in mind when I pictured paying with my phone.