With the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox, you need to pay to play. So why are these devices not taken seriously in the payments world? Mobile payments seem to have stalled — just witness the cardcentric future envisioned by presenters at Goldman Sachs & Co.’s financial technology conference this fall. So where to look for the next payments innovation? It’s already here, and it’s taking place in the gaming systems sitting in many of our living rooms. Apple has yet to launch a payments platform for general use, but that hasn’t stopped speculation that it will. It makes sense that Apple will link up a payment mechanism to its virtual wallet-like Passbook to enable the iPhone as a payment vehicle. ITunes has a whopping 575 million cards on file, and cards on file is the name of the game. Square is trying to beef up its roster of cards with Square Cash, a free P2P service, in order to compete with PayPal (137 million cards on file.) ITunes made paying for media simple. With the Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5S, it’s even simpler (even though reports have it that the sensor doesn’t perform well). It’s also easy to pay one’s [...]
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