Mobile payments and NFC have been buzzwords of the last year in tandem with the e-tail over retail boom, but the wave is coming to fruition with Commonwealth Bank’s introduction of Kaching.
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The newly released ‘Kaching’ is an iPhone app that brings Near Field Communications (NFC) payment capability and social banking services to Apple handsets.
The app brings in most of the functionality of Commonwealth Bank’s NetBank web-browser banking solution plus the ability to make payments from a mobile via email, phone number or Facebook.
Bankers can access their account balance, pay bills through BPAY and send and receive peer-to-peer payments, regardless of whether others are with Commonwealth Bank or not.
There are similar systems out there like ANZ’s goMoney application, but Kaching’s key differentiator is the NFC element.
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Kaching is currently iPhone-exclusive available on the App Store as the Android version is still in development.
Apple’s latest smartphones are yet to be built with NFC chips that allow contactless interaction with NFC enabled devices, so the contactless payments (like MasterCard’s PayPass) only work with a special iPhone 4 case.
The iCarte case has to be bought from Commonwealth Bank for around $50, ordered on their site.
New Android-run smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus are hitting Australian shores with in-built NFC chips, but Kaching is yet to be developed to run on these phones.
Mobile phones are becoming a key part of the modern shopper’s arsenal, and Google has picked up on the trend.
Google research last month found that a quarter of Christmas shopping-related queries on its search engine came in on a mobile device.
