Hewlett Packard has signed up to The Mobey Forum, a bank-backed initiative to encourage the use of mobile technology in financial services.
Since inception last year, the Mobey Forum has garnered support from over 30 leading financial services organisations and mobile handset manufacturers. The Forum has proposed the use of a second chip slot which would sit alongside the SIM in today's mobile phones and take bank payment cards. Nordic financial conglomerate Nordea is currently trialling a Mobey-conformant payment system in association with Nokia in Sweden.
Arly Christophersen, senior strategic advisor at HP, compares the consumer potential of mobile-financial services to SMS messaging which took several years to take off. "We believe strongly that the financial sector will be one of the main drivers behind the uptake of this technology," he says.
"We have been actively investigating secure payments and handset devices ourselves and feel that, as the Mobey Forum's PPA (preferred payment architecture) proposal has been designed with an open architecture in mind and utilising as much of today's infrastructure for transactions as possible, it will provide a strong stimulus for the development of this technology," says Christopherson.