Mobile phones to replace cash

The Telegraph reports.

Carl Scheible, MD of PayPal UK, says: “By 2016, you'll be able to leave your wallet at home and use your mobile as the 21st century digital wallet; 2016 will mark the real start of money's digital switchover in the UK.

“We're not saying cash will disappear entirely, but we'll increasingly use our phones and other devices rather than our wallets to pay in-store as well as online.”

SC Magazine states PayPal expects to process more than $3.5 billion in global mobile payments in 2011 - five times the value it processed in 2010. By 2016, UK mobile retail sales will reach £2.5 billion, according to PayPal.

Thales recently rolled out cryptographic technology to allow payment applications to be loaded onto mobile phones with the application hosted in a GlobalPlatform Secure Element via its hardware security module.

The Register says the 2016 start date should give companies time to embrace near-field communications (NFC) payments that allow for secure communication between the phone and the reader, without involving the cloud.