E-Money Coming Soon!

New Media Age have a front page leader on the European Commission's decision to allow e-money.

This means that the UK Financial Services Authority will be able reverse it's current policy of not allowing mobile phone payments for physical goods and other digital content. At present prepaid airtime is viewed as e-money for anything not delivered and consumed on a phone.

The FSA is currently consulting the industry on what position is should take, but everyone seems in favour of using the phone bill for payments. The phone networks would have to be on-board should the FSA approve the change and most seem to be making very positive noises about it.

So what does this mean practically? Well it opens up m-commerce for a start. Take a gig ticketing site like Aloud.com, it could potentially offer users the ability to pay for their tickets on their phone bill. Empire could offer cinema tickets, Q could offer CDs and National Rail could offer train tickets. There is a lot of scope, and we're bound to see a whole host of very exciting new mobile services launching soon in the UK.