Do you think your wallet feels cluttered with all the cards you have to carry? Do you invariably forget to draw cash from the bank? Do you think it is a big bother to remember to carry cash or card? If you do, it's time to stop fretting. Your best buddy - the mobile phone - is gearing up to come to the rescue. It might actually not be long before you can pay through your mobile phone instead of swiping your card. And, if you happened to be in The Netherlands towards the end of last year, and happened to be one of the chosen customers at the C1000 supermarket in Molenaarsgraaf, you might already have had a taste of it. As part of a pilot project initiated by Logica, NXP Semiconductors, financial services provider Rabobank, telecommunication services provider KPN and Schuitema, the supermarket organisation behind C1000, hundred customers were chosen who would be able to pay their bills at the supermarket through their mobile phones for six months. NEAR FIELD COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY Project PINnen met je Mobiel was born from the urge to put to practice the Near Field Communication technology in a real-world consumer market environment. NFC uses high frequency radio waves to transfer information between devices. NFC-devices establish a connection when they are brought close. The project was focused on using NFC in financial transactions, where the mobile phone would replace a traditional debit card. To offer a taste of the wide range of other possible applications, the mobile phone was also used as a repository for bottle refunds. This enabled the users to receive, save and transfer their refunds. The 100 customers, varying in age from 16 to 68, were given NFC-enabled mobile phones. NFC technology was fitted into the bottle return machines, cash registers, information terminal and transaction terminal. `OOPS, FORGOT MY CARD' A report on the project says all customers who had been invited to participate in the pilot adapted to the new technology very quickly. Some of them actually forgot to carry their debit cards even while shopping at other places, the report adds Gerben Mak, Director Innovation, Logica, says, in future, the NFC-enabled phones will be able to read prices of products as well. In the pilot project, the phones were not able to read prices because the products were not yet NFC-tagged. He says the participating supermarket is very interested in this kind of value-added service. There are also plans to introduce mobile payments in The Netherlands, though there are a number of challenges that need to be overcome, Mak says. The ecosystem behind mobile payments (the collaboration model for stakeholders such as banks, retailers, trusted service managers and other companies) has not yet been sorted out yet. Logica will launch an Ecosystem pilot later this year. Another challenge is the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) regulation, issued by the European Union. A new (mobile) payment scheme can only be deployed on a larger scale by involved companies if it has been SEPA-certified, Mak says.