So, I’ve resorted to 3 wallets, my everyday wallet, my travel wallet and my gift card wallet.   In all, I have over 25 pieces of plastic and accumulate no less than 30 paper receipts monthly.   Don’t get me started on paper receipts – not only do they clutter my wallet for the better part of the week but each month I reconcile and file all of them and store them for years on end.

We live in an electronic world and while I’m sure I’ll need to have cash on hand for some of the little things in life, I’d be much more satisfied if I could transfer some of the burden off of my right leg (that’s where I keep my wallet) and onto my left leg (that’s where I keep my phone).

Can somebody please help me mobilize my plastic?   I get that some things are more difficult than others – there seems to be some resistance with credit and debit cards because of distribution, operations, security, hardware and customer stewardship issues.   These same issues aren’t as dominant in the gift card world (particularly closed-loop).   While loyalty programs keep vying for real-estate in our wallets, isn’t it about knowing that you have the card and using it?   The collection rate is astoundingly low for most single-merchant focused programs because consumers forget their cards or question the value.  

I really think there’s a spectrum that will be advanced through to get to the full gamut of services that your phone will be capable of:  

Informational mCommerce –alerts, news, stock quotes, basic balance information

Transactional mCommerce –P2P, mobile cash, trading (stocks, forex), fund transfer, bill payment, remittances

Fully Interactive mCommerce –mobile banking, proximity alerts, stock alerts, authorization requests, text to buy, and semantic interpretation

Reaching fully interactive mCommerce capabilities will obviously be contingent on having the right devices in people’s hands, but let’s face it – with the majority of consumers having feature phones and huge growth in smart phones, we can’t blame it on the devices anymore.   Bank of America seems to be on the right track, their application speaks to their target segment.   Eventually everyone will have access to their banks via mobile phone – even those without a bank account … they will be using some type of prepaid account to manage their finances.  

The one big thing online banking has missed out on is payment revenue – that’s why the mobile play is going to be huge.   It’s the first real opportunity to mix traditional banking and payments into one device and phones can offer value-added shopping and payment services like couponing and electronic receipts.

Let’s mobilize the easy stuff … put the things that are often furthest from my mind closest to my finger tips (gift cards and loyalty cards).   That should be a good starting point.   After that we can move to the more complex forms of payment like credit and debit cards and then remittances (domestic and international).  

Mobilizing plastic not only makes sense from a card management perspective, it makes sense from an environmental perspective.   The irony is that while phones are getting smaller and more powerful, wallets are getting bigger and less powerful.