A mobile payment ‘wish list’ of my own

Marc Andreessen, partner of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, this week complained he was “sick of carrying his wallet around” and that he wants to transact through his phone. He wants his mobile device to become a “versatile wallet” that will act as “credit card, cash, PayPal, Facebook credits, and more.”

I don’t carry the weight of a Mark Andreessen (especially not in my wallet), but I do have the ability to complain with the best of ‘em, so I have a few non-techno-speak wishes of my own, and I’d like my wireless operator to listen to what would make me go ga-ga for mobile payments.

I’d like to accommodate my husband’s request for hot-dog money while standing in the middle of a crowded subway by tapping my phone to his phone to transfer money while holding a baby in one arm with my wallet buried deep in diaper bag. I want to transfer funds to my college-age sister via SMS to pay for the towing of her car in double-parking in Manhattan incident. I’d like to be able to laugh at all the poor souls (like Boston Red Sox fans) standing in the two-mile line snaking around the Yankee Stadium ticket office, as I remotely buy last-minute tickets perhaps by tapping on NFC (near-field communications) posters (as opposed to the sometimes painful process of mobile Web browsing to do it over the Internet). And if I buy nose-bleed seats at a Syracuse basketball game in my college town, and my recently Facebook-friended college roommate happens to be in the vicinity of the dome, I’d like to know her whereabouts and invite her to join me, and buy her a ticket in one click (perhaps I’d tolerate two) while smirking at those burdened with doing it the “old fashioned way.”

I want this all happen in a centralized manner so all my compulsive purchases show up in one spot—preferably my phone bill or on my online bank statement. And I would like it all to be pushed to my phone proactively as I go along, so I can see just what the heck I’m spending my money on. And I want this established without lots of paperwork or snail mail.

I just want to feel like I have magical powers so I can do person-to-person payments, remote ticketing, and mobile commerce without the hassle of reading elaborate contracts or filling in lots of fields on online forms. Who has time for that?

This week, we saw some key advances on the mobile payment front. PayPal – whose conference Andreessen made his mobile payments plea – launched a mobile version of its payment services. Elsewhere, Sprint initiated simple PIN-driven mobile payments and AT&T cut deals with payment vendors, showing a willingness to drive more payments by taking a small cut of the pie. But that’s just the start.

So mobile operators: please do more to push NFC and develop “on-device clients” that will allow us—the scatter-brained, multi-tasking, over-loaded North Americans—to use the phone as a credit card or ATM card or as a means for depositing cash, sending money to friends or family via texting, or purchasing items. You, the mobile network operator, sit in an ideal place for partnering and for innovating and marketing and billing for value-added services.

With more and more vendors coming out with “framework” solutions to expedite time to market and foment scalability (e.g., in software-as-a-service models), it will be more likely that you can come up with more innovative and robust solutions. With cloud computing, heavy-duty computing can take place elsewhere. Let the Amazons and Rackspaces of the world handle that. Just realize that we, the unorganized and over-cluttered, need your help!

We just want one- or two-click experiences requiring nothing more than the push of a button to make purchasing and transacting faster and easier so we can concentrate on what’s important in life. And it would be icing on the cake to have a social experience to off-set the pains of paying for things. So if I feel guilt about buying an item, but can offset it by knowing my girlfriend is around the corner and free to share some time with me, then it brings all the more value to me as a customer, and builds that much more loyalty between me and the company that enables that to happen. And so “branding” by the mobile operators will be very important when partnering with merchants and internet payors like PayPal.

I’ll be submitting this wish-list to Santa next month as well.