Mobile Muddle: When Will ISIS Start Making Sense?
Written by Frank HayesThe muddled mobile-payments scheme from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, dubbed ISIS, just keeps getting more puzzling. On Tuesday (April 4), the group announced a pilot project to let mobile phones be used to pay for rides on Salt Lake City’s buses and local trains, in addition to purchases at local retailers. But the big announcement is for a project that won’t go live for more than a year—and for a public transit system that already allows customers to use contactless credit and debit cards to pay for rides. This will take a year?
Meanwhile, Sprint—which was left out of ISIS’ announcement of its formation in November—now says it was originally part of the group, but left. Although ISIS member Discover was originally presented as the only payments network ISIS needed, it now appears that Discover may not have an exclusive deal with ISIS after all. All this confusion comes in the face of one clear fact: Mobile operators should have the easiest time doing true mobile payments. When will they get their collective act together?
In the case of ISIS, it won’t be until at least mid-2012. That’s when Salt Lake City’s transit system, the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), will be entirely “ISIS-enabled,” making UTA “the first commercially available mobile transportation fare payment program in the U.S.”
Well, maybe. That’s only if Apple, Google, Visa, MasterCard, Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Sprint or anyone else in the long line of mobile-payment wannabes don’t cut a deal with some other transit agency. (MasterCard may have the inside track on that, because it has already done a contactless trial with New York City’s transit system.)
Salt Lake City retailers are also part of ISIS’ plan—or at least ISIS thinks so. The group didn’t name any specific retailers that have agreed to use ISIS for payments, just that it’s talking to the local Chamber of Commerce. Considering that long list of would-be mobile-payment companies—some of which, like Google, have been sweet-talking retailers into participating in pilot programs—it’s baffling that ISIS isn’t being more concrete.
In fact, ISIS turns out to be a lot more vague in many areas than you might have thought.
-Marc
April 13th, 2011 at 11:22 am
I can’t help but feel I am missing something – I’ve heard this point several times in regrads to ISIS and how they should do mobile payments/purchases:
“a mobile operator can authenticate a customer, and already does that every time the customer makes a phone call.”
But really – they’re just authenticating who the phoen is tied to… it doesn’t know when I hand my phone to a friend so she can make a phone call… as far as it knows, it’s me making it. And what if I lose my phone? Anyone can make a call with it – until I report it lost/stolen, the phone doesn’t authenticate that it’s not me using the phone…
So why would it be so great to use the phone to authenticate the user and add the purchase to their phone bill? In my opinion – there are enough unauthorized third party charges that can be added to your phone bill (usually getting there through social engineering or spam)… we don’t need another way to tack on more charges… unless the phone company wants to be the one to write off unauthorized charges. Short of reporting your phone lost/stole, would they even be willing to correct the charge?
There is a lot of grey area here – and many ways for people to be able to work the system (sadly)… I fail to see how using a cell phone could possibly make it any more secure and prove that it was me using it. Not that anyone checks your ID when you write CID on the back of your credit card either though. Sadly today I don’t think much merchants much care if you’re truly the authorized user or not.